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The story of two women in the mid-twentieth-century South navigating financial independence, a changing rural landscape, and social norms. Flannery and Regina: The Andalusia Chronicles (NewSouth Books, 2026) tells the story of Flannery O’Connor and her mother, Regina, after Flannery’s lupus diagnosis forced her to move back to Milledgeville, Georgia. Just as her career as one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished writers of short fiction was beginning to take off, the disease that killed her father confined her to the family farm, Andalusia. The book fills in the gaps for fans of Flannery on the role of Regina in her life but more broadly presents a story of two women in the South of the 1950s and 1960s navigating financial independence, a changing rural landscape, and social norms.It’s a story of a mother and daughter, sometimes understanding each other, often not, but trying to cobble together parallel and overlapping lives. Perhaps most interesting to readers of O’Connor, or anyone interested in the biography of an author no longer able to control a public image, is the detailing of how Regina tried to direct and cultivate Flannery’s image after her death, though we get the sense she understood very little of her daughter as an artist. Carol Loeb Shloss is a former acting professor of English and Irish literature at Stanford University. Widely known for her work on modernist writers, her books include Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, a Pulitzer Prize nominee and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Let the Wind Speak: Mary de Rachewiltz and Ezra Pound; Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference; and two books on literature and photography. Since writing her seminal book on Flannery O’Connor in 1980, she has published essays and reviews in Flannery O’Connor Review and many other journals. She currently resides in Philadelphia. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the early twentieth century, most US states established eugenics programs to improve the human race through selective breeding. North Carolina ran one of the nation's most aggressive programs; between 1927 and 1977, at least 5,700 people were sterilized and thousands more were committed to institutions. While sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s disproportionately targeted Black women receiving public assistance, the program's early focus was on poor white women. These policies were framed as scientific and progressive, yet they were deeply intertwined with racial and class biases, reflecting long-standing social hierarchies in the South. Anna Krome-Lukens examines those early years and reveals how such white reformers as social workers, politicians, and activists promoted the principles of eugenics while shaping the emerging welfare state before and during the New Deal. Tracing this history, the book illuminates how North Carolina's eugenics programs influenced the modern welfare state and how their legacy continues to shape debates over social policy today.  The episode brings the Book Review Managing Editor of the Journal of Women's History, Ariel Schnee (History PhD Candidate, University of Oklahoma), into conversation with the book's author, historian and scholar of public policy Dr. Anna Krome-Lukens (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). Copies of Strong State, Weak Links: Eugenics and the Southern Politics of Welfare (UNC Press, 2026) can be found at the University of North Carolina Press website. The Journal of Women's History can be found here and online at Project Muse. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”In How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington (Pantheon, 2026), Pulitzer Prizing-winning author Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before. Dr. Marcia Chatelain a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls and Franchise, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, the Hagley Prize for Business History, and the Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok.  Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like. Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Featuring personal essay, manifesto, creative nonfiction, and poetry, Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico (Feminist Press, 2025) gathers the multiplicity of voices being raised in Mexico today against patriarchy and its buried structures. Tackling gender violence, community building, #MeToo, Indigenous rights, and more, these writings rock the core of what we know feminism to be, dismantling its Eurocentric roots and directing its critical thrust towards current affairs in Mexico today. Asserting plurality as a political priority, Tsunami includes trans voices, Indigenous voices, Afro-Latinx voices, voices from within and outside academic institutions, and voices spanning generations. Tsunami is the combined force and critique of the three feminist waves, the marea verde (“green wave”) of protests that have swept through Latin America in recent years, and the tides turned by insurgent feminisms at the margins of public discourse. Guest: Gabriela Jauregui’s books include Feral, Many Fiestas, and La memoria de las cosas. She edited and coauthored Tsunami and Tsunami 2, published in Spanish in 2018 and 2021 respectively. She is a Soros New American Fellow, a Borchard Fellow, and was part of the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 best young authors in Latin America. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from USC and teaches at the National Autonomous University in Mexico (UNAM). Guest: Heather Cleary is an award-winning translator whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the National Book Foundation, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Mellon Foundation. A member of the Cedilla & Co. translation collective, she was a founding editor of the digital, multilingual Buenos Aires Review. She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is a developmental editor and writing coach for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and the show’s newsletter. Playlist: Thanks to LifeThe Madres de la Plaza de MayoThe Things We Didn't KnowIn The Garden Behind The MoonThe CommonThe Translators DaughterWe Take Our Cities With UsA Calm and Normal HeartThe Names of All the FlowersWelcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

During the interwar years, Vietnamese society witnessed a rapid change in the way women looked. Rejecting the model of a sequestered maiden with blackened teeth and long hair, they embraced a vivid palette of colors—and a colorful lifestyle to match. Before the war, Vietnam would have seemed like an unlikely place for a beauty industry to thrive. Virtuous young women were expected to hide their natural beauty, not manipulate it with makeup or flaunt it at a beauty contest. Yet ordinary women began seeking out the latest fashions—to great public consternation. In Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia UP, 2025), Christina E. Firpo explores the development of beauty culture in this period, showing how women’s faces and bodies became contested sites for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in the modern world. She considers dress patterns, lip-lining tutorials, hairstyles, physiques, and beauty pageants alongside new technologies of media, transportation, and leisure and the anxieties they provoked. The everyday decisions women made about their appearance, Firpo argues, were ways to stake a claim to the roles they wanted to play in the new society taking shape around them. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia University Press, 2026) offers fresh insight into the tumultuous political, economic, social, and cultural changes that swept across Vietnam during this crucial period.Christina E. Firpo is professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is the author of Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2016). Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on 20th-century Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation in Vietnam across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at [email protected]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How can we achieve lasting social and political equality for women? Dr. Leda Pérez tackles this thorny question in Searching for Democracy: Women, Domestic Work, and Social Reproduction in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) by interrogating egalitarianism in Latin America, where nearly 20% of women work in domestic service. She examines how women’s participation in society, labor, and politics continues to be conditioned by their relationship to domestic and care work. Dr. Pérez argues that women’s relationship to these spheres of life is indicative of a nation’s development and democracy. She provides a comparative focus on the socio-cultural valuation of this labor and the experiences of women in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, among other countries. Pérez asserts that it is only by changing sociocultural views on this “women’s work” that nations can create political change, foster equitable legislation, and ensure implementation of effective policies that benefit women. Searching for Democracy shows why real and lasting equality cannot be achieved without fully enfranchising women in the lowest tiers of employment and closing the equality gap among women. Dr. Pérez’s models for gender equality are relevant for women around the world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to write that flowed from the body?" Presence is her answer. The book draws from a vast array of archival and printed sources to illustrate the realities of women's physical experiences in early modern Europe, from eating, pregnancy, abortion, birth, nursing, sleeping, working, and dying. Maglaque intersperses her historical narrative with personal accounts, demonstrating the ways in which studying the past can impact our lives today. For anyone interested in women's history, the history of labor, early modern health and medicine, or simply the purpose and potential of historical study, Presence is the book to read. Erin Maglaque is a historian of early modern Europe and gender. She teaches at Durham University and writes for publications including the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor (Princeton UP, 2026) follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival. Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers. Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms. Sara McDougall is professor of history at John Jay College of the City University of New York and is on the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Her fellowships include the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

American pop culture loves newsies. The children who bawled out headlines and sold newspapers on city streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been depicted countless times in movies, Broadway shows, books, music, and more, but somehow it’s only ever the stories of newsboys that are told. Scholarly literature too has focused mostly on boy newsies. Yet for nearly as long as there were newspapers in the United States, there were also newsgirls. Girl newsies were photographed, interviewed, studied, argued over, and eventually absorbed into the collective “newsboys” and forgotten. Extra! Extra! A History of America's Girl Newsies (U Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Autumn Lorimer Linford offers a corrective, demonstrating the importance of newsgirls as early news workers and as symbols of child labor and gender reform efforts. Sometimes younger than ten years old and from impoverished families, girl newsies were already vulnerable to exploitation from the newspaper publishing industry, which relied heavily on child labor during the “golden age” of journalism. However, the newsgirls of this period contributed much to news labor, and they were important to the discussions concerning childhood, child labor reform, and women’s changing societal roles. Properly integrating newsgirls into the history of newsies dismantles archetypes and enables a deeper understanding of child news labor. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Between 1990 and 2020, women candidates won only 6% of the world’s presidential races. How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) explains the factors, strategies, and perceptions that help (or hinder) women to democratically access their country’s highest political office. Dr. Catherine Reyes-Housholder introduces a theory of gendered incentives and perceived potential to reveal why a political party would break with tradition and nominate a woman. She also shows how citizens respond when women candidates are running in incumbent parties or competing to displace those in power. Drawing on comparative research on the presidency and gender, How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America examines the successful campaigns of Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as why Blanca Ovelar lost her presidential race in Paraguay. Dr. Reyes-Housholder’s findings indicate that voter sexism is not a major factor; however, women do not triumph in these elections in the same ways that men do. Rather, the central unknown factor behind women’s victories is how they become candidates of major parties—and gender profoundly influences who parties nominate. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the 1970s, as women started to enter the labor force in unprecedented numbers, economists began to examine their roles as economic actors. The result was the rise of gender economics, now a major subfield with powerful data and new methods comparing the economic lives of men and women. Yet despite decades of progress, many of the most consequential questions about gender inequality remain unresolved. In How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the Twenty-First Century (U California Press, 2026), renowned economist and demographer Dr. Shelly Lundberg argues that the problem is not a lack of evidence but a failure to challenge entrenched economic models and outmoded assumptions about markets and gender that have limited what the field can explain. Why does occupational segregation persist? Why do "women's jobs" pay less? Why are men falling behind in education? And why do policies like paternity leave fail to change behavior? Drawing on more than five decades in the field and integrating insights from other social sciences, Dr. Lundberg explains signs of recent progress and charts a path toward a more realistic, socially grounded economics capable of meeting the challenges of gender inequality today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fulvia was born into wealth, privilege, and prestige around the year 80 BCE, yet there was nothing inherently special about her—she was not a saint, an empress, or a queen. But during the years leading up to the fall of the Roman Republic, Fulvia was moving in the most powerful social circles, and by her death in 40 BCE she had amassed a degree of political and military power unprecedented for a woman. Fulvia’s success came at considerable cost, however. None of her three marriages to politically powerful men—most famously to Marc Antony—lasted, and three of her five children died violently. She was repeatedly ridiculed for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere. The deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation shaped her legacy for two millennia. Ample literary, documentary, and archaeological sources for Fulvia exist, yet most contemporary depictions of her were extremely negative. In Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (Yale UP, 2025) historian Jane Draycott, reading between the lines of the ancient evidence, proposes a more nuanced interpretation. Using Fulvia as a guide, she invites readers to visit an unfamiliar Rome, one in which women played a crucial role during Rome’s violent transition from a republic to the dictatorship of the Roman Empire. Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the university’s Games and Gaming Lab. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Should willingness to kill be a requirement for U.S. citizenship? Girl Without a Country: The Untold Story of a Landmark Fight for U.S. Citizenship (Purdue University Press, 2026) by Rick Ramseyer tells the compelling, confounding story of Martha Graber—a Mennonite, registered nurse, and conscientious objector who in 1929 was twice denied citizenship because she refused to say she would take up arms to defend the United States. The unexpected denials, which came despite Martha's pledge to give her life for her adopted country, caught the attention of a diverse group of peace advocates, religious leaders, lawyers, and politicians, setting up a climactic third court appearance. Martha’s nineteen-month fight for citizenship made national news, featuring dramatic testimony, historical insights, and interesting backstories that stretched from Alsace-Lorraine in western Europe to America’s heartland. Elegantly written by Martha’s maternal grandson with never-before-published details and closely connected with a controversial Supreme Court decision, Girl Without a Country surfaces an array of topical issues, ranging from immigration and naturalization to conscientious objection and patriotism. Perhaps most importantly, Martha’s story considers what it truly means to be an American. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been historically revered throughout the Islamic tradition. This began already in the Qur'an, where she is called by the name "Maryam." The Islamic Mary: Maryam Through the Centuries (Fortress Press, 2025) examines the varied appearances of Maryam in different Islamic cultural and theological contexts. The chapters in this history extend from Maryam's scriptural mentions in the Qur'an and the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, her appearances in medieval debates regarding prophecy, citations of her virtuous model in Sufi discussions of piety, presentations in art and film, through to her role in modern interfaith relations. Younus Y. Mirza is the Founding Director of the Barzinji Institute for Global Virtual Learning at Shenandoah University. He defended his dissertation in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University and has taught at Millsaps and Allegheny Colleges. His research focuses on the relationship between the Bible and the Qur’an and the shared stories between them Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.