Advertise on podcast: New Books Network

Today I’m speaking with Stephanie Williams, Director of Wayne State University Press, and president of the Association of University Presses. Every year, NBN speaks with the president of AUPresses in anticipation of University Press Week. This year, press week will take place from November 9 through the 13th, with the theme: #PowerUP. To celebrate, I’m thrilled to speak with Stephanie Williams about all things UPs. University Press Week Info Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Be the main character in the story that is your life – that is the ambition of eight remarkable women featured in Anne Fernald’s collective biography, Her Own Voice, guided by Virginia Woolf. We talk about Margaret Wise Brown, groundbreaking author of Goodnight Moon, addressed to young children and inspired by Gertrude Stein and Woolf, Jessie Redmon Fauset, prolific novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director to make both silent and sound films, inventor of the boom mic, and five other remarkable women who ignite our ability to change within the contingencies of our lives. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

To listen to the entire four-part series, subscribe here. In 2018, Gyula Remes died in the underpass at Westminster tube station, just steps from the Houses of Parliament and luxury developments worth millions. How could this happen in one of the richest cities on Earth? Episode one introduces Gyula and the world he died in: a Westminster plagued by the twin crises of homelessness and empty homes. In a London borough where extreme wealth exists alongside extreme poverty, Kojo traces the circumstances of Gyula’s death and a troubling question emerges. What begins as a local tragedy opens the door to a much larger system, which we open onto a strange land called ‘offshore’. Kojo Karam is a Professor in Law and Political Economy at the School of Law at Loughborough University. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Veronica Villarreal earned her joint MHA/MBA at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, took her first job out of the program at DHR Health in the Rio Grande Valley, and worked her way up through revenue cycle and operations into the C-suite. She served as Chief Ambulatory Officer over a network of roughly 75 clinic locations and more than 30 specialty service lines. She then moved to UT Health Rio Grande Valley, where she is now Chief Operating Officer. Along the way, she wrote the book she wishes someone had handed her. C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate Success became an Amazon bestseller and was featured in Forbes. In this episode, Veronica traces the actual route: why revenue cycle turned out to be an executive on-ramp rather than a detour, what an interim title really tests, what it takes to move from a private specialty network into an academic health system, and why she thinks comparison is the thing most likely to derail a talented person’s career. Flight Path is produced by the Department of Healthcare Administration at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, which has offered healthcare administration education since 1974 and is based in the Texas Medical Center. A University of Houston - Clear Lake MHA/MBA grad who climbed from revenue cycle to COO, and then wrote the roadmap for everyone behind her. GUEST BIO Veronica Villarreal, MHA/MBA, is Chief Operating Officer of UT Health Rio Grande Valley. At UT Health RGV, she previously served as Assistant Vice President of Operations, leading multi-site ambulatory operations.Before that, she was Chief Ambulatory Officer at DHR Health Clinics, overseeing approximately 75 clinic locations across more than 30 specialty and sub-specialty service lines.She began her career in ambulatory revenue cycle.She is the author of C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate Success, an Amazon bestseller featured in Forbes.She holds a joint Master of Healthcare Administration and Master of Business Administration from the University of Houston–Clear Lake.LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate SuccessVeronica’s websiteVeronica on LinkedInUHCL alumni feature, “From quiet corners to big impact” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Rediscovery of George "Nash" Walker: : The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America (SUNY Press, 2025) is the first biography dedicated to the life and cultural contributions of this actor, writer, and producer who revolutionized Black American theatre during the early twentieth century. In 1892, Walker left his hometown with a medicine show and quickly formed a partnership with comedian Bert Williams that would last nearly eighteen years. Under the moniker of “The Two Real Coons,” Williams and Walker used their comedy to erode the stereotyped White image of minstrel-style “cooning.” Their theatrical company produced many popular plays, including Clorindy/A Lucky Coon (1899–1900), Policy Players (1900–1901), Sons of Ham (1901–1902), In Dahomey (1902–1905), Abyssinia (1905–1906), Bandanna Land (1907–1909), and Mr. Lode of Koal (1909–1910), even performing on Broadway and abroad. An activist at heart, Walker insisted that audiences receive carefully curated Black entertainment, told from a uniquely Afro-American perspective. Unfortunately, Walker contracted syphilis and was forced to retire in 1909, marking the end of the first golden age of Black theatre. Despite his landmark contributions, Walker’s story has been largely forgotten. Drawing on archival resources, newspaper accounts, memoirs, oral histories, and manifestos written by Walker, this book celebrates the accomplishments of the vanguard generation of Black artists who were active between the close of the Civil War and the start of World War I. Daniel Atkinson’s research and commitment to the legacy of George Walker and his generation is deep and authentic. Listen in on this fantastic conversation and check out also previous episodes with Dr. Cheryl Thompson and Es-pranza Humphry, both scholars of this era. And when you’re finished, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack where we continued our conversation. Daniel E. Atkinson is an independent scholar who earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington where he specialized in Afro-American music and culture. You can find Daniel on Instagram and LinkedIn. 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.

What is magic, and why does it keep returning in new disguises? For a special Halloween episode, host Ryan Shinkel is joined by essayist and novelist Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature, Here in Avalon, Strange Rites, and Self-Made, to trace the Western esoteric tradition from the Renaissance to the present. Burton describes learned magic as the search for hidden correspondences between things, a humanist project that promised not union with God but the chance to become godlike through secret knowledge. The conversation follows that promise through Ficino’s Hermetic translations at the Medici court, the 19th-century occult revival and its turn from proto-science toward art, reaction, and the unstable self, and the American arrival of New Thought, which gave us manifesting. Along the way: why the technocratic class keeps finding itself at the center of the magical worldview, what the tradition’s two-tier esotericism has in common with the noble lie, and how occult imagery shaped modern propaganda. Burton also discusses how her own search for beauty led her to Anglo-Catholicism, whether demons can possess a chatbot, the nature of charisma, and what a human writer can offer that a large language model cannot. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

El Salvador Reborn: Abortion, Environment, and the Politics of Survival in a Postwar Nation ( examines the nation’s efforts to reshape its identity after the Peace Accords amid declining Cold War tensions. The book explores activism in postwar El Salvador by focusing on two key organizations, Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto and Foro del Agua, highlighting their political strategies during a critical moment in El Salvador’s formation. Linton-Villafranco makes the case for a holistic conception of life that integrates land, body, and community sovereignty, weaving reproductive justice with environmental activism to promote a broader, interconnected understanding of life and rights in El Salvador. Mellissa Linton-Villafranco is an assistant professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University’s School of Social Transformation, where she also coordinates the LGBT Studies Certificate. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Karmic Winds: Reflections from “The Smartest Guy in Hollywood” (Rare Bird Books, 2026) is a memoir of power, collapse, and reckoning by Peter M. Hoffman, a Yale-trained lawyer and Hollywood insider who once stood at the center of the independent film boom and later found himself stripped of status, freedom, and certainty. As president of Carolco Pictures, Hoffman helped steer an era-defining slate that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, and Rambo, navigating a world of massive egos, creative brilliance, and financial brinkmanship. But ambition has its cost. After the industry turns, legal battles mount, and a federal conviction leads to imprisonment, Hoffman is forced into a confrontation far more exacting than any boardroom negotiation: a reckoning with his own choices, illusions, and moral blind spots. Set partly within the quiet, disorienting confines of Terminal Island federal prison, Karmic Winds traces a journey through humiliation and loss toward clarity and acceptance. Drawing on philosophy, Buddhism, and a lifelong search for meaning, Hoffman examines the nature of justice, the seductions of power, and the invisible forces—personal and systemic—that shape our lives. Neither a tell-all nor a plea for absolution, Karmic Winds is a deeply reflective account of success and failure, told with intellectual rigor and emotional restraint. It is a story of what remains when the titles disappear, the noise falls away, and one is left alone with the self...and the winds that carried them there. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The history of the environmental movement-from environmentalism of the nineteenth century to the environmental justice struggles of the late twentieth century-has often been portrayed as a series of efforts led by white environmentalists. In Stewards of the Land, Stevie Ruiz reassesses the movement and reveals that it has always been a multiracial endeavor. From Southern California berry fields to Japanese American concentration camps, from Chinese cooks in national parks to Chicano Civilian Conservation Corps workers, Ruiz traces how the racialized labor and environmental knowledge of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities built the material foundations of modern environmentalism. Stewards of the Land: Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West (UNC Press, 2026) argues that environmental justice was never just a reaction to pollution in the 1970s but has a much longer history tied to land theft, labor exploitation, and the everyday struggles of frontline communities to live and work with dignity. Drawing from comparative ethnic studies and archival research and with a commitment to decolonial praxis, Ruiz recovers the stories of those who labored-often invisibly-to build, maintain, and reimagine environmental spaces in the American West. Stevie Ruiz is a Professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge and a historian, author, and environmental justice scholar. 
His research focuses on the intersection of labor, immigration, and the American environmental movement — the work of building, maintaining, and stewarding the land that is so
often left out of the story. For more information about his work, see his website. Kalani Foster is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester whose research focuses on the intersection between biodiversity conservation, data and technology, and coloniality. For more information, and ways to contact him, see his research profile. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wartime leaders should understand the link between violent means and political ends. They should also have a sense of how strategic decisions will affect the post-war peace. Yet they often fail to make these connections. Mistaking strategy for grand strategy, or misunderstanding the relationship between them, can frustrate soldiers and statesmen alike. Sometimes it can lead to national ruin. In this Adelphi book Strategy and Grand Strategy (Routledge, 2025), Joshua Rovner offers a lucid analysis of strategy (a theory of victory) and grand strategy (a theory of security). He demonstrates vividly how these concepts interact in case studies from antiquity to the present, and he describes the implications for war and peace at a time of extraordinary technological change. Rovner’s work will prove indispensable to policymakers, scholars and anyone seeking to grasp these essential but often misunderstood concepts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Caught between wars raging in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Greece is an island of relative stability. Popularly considered the cradle of Western civilisation, this is a Christian Orthodox state on the edge of the Islamic world. And, after a half-century of integration into NATO and the EU, Greece is now reabsorbing into the Near East, as the West fractures and new Middle Eastern powers rise. The country’s importance as a cultural and geopolitical hybrid is growing. Travelling through the region, Sean Mathews explores at ground level the tectonic shifts reshaping Europe and the Middle East. He meets the last Greek merchants in Cairo, and hears from Istanbul’s remaining Greeks about Turkey’s break with the West. In Jerusalem, he discovers a budding alliance between Greece and Israel; and in a faded Ottoman port, he encounters football hooligans loyal to a Russian oligarch. The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East (Hurst, 2025) is a bold reappraisal of Greece as a Near Eastern nation uncovers its Byzantine and Ottoman past as a key to survival in today’s chaotic, shrinking world.Sean Mathews is a Greek-American journalist who has covered a wide swath of the Middle East. He is a correspondent with Middle East Eye, and has also written for The Economist and Al-Monitor, among others. He calls Athens home and travels often in the region. This is his first book.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. He is also a host on the Thinking Global podcast for E-International Relations.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Few things delight a historical novelist more than true stories of forgotten individuals remembered, if they are remembered at all, for one dramatic moment or act. Flora Cordier—a Belgian glove maker who apparently married the last effective Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), before his accession to the throne—is just such a person. Flora left almost no impression in the historical record, not much more than a newspaper account and a few references to her outside the empire in later life, yet the question of how a European craftswoman might not only have set up shop in nineteenth-century Istanbul but have also crossed the path of a prince from the House of Osman begs to be told. Christina Ståhle tackles this problem with aplomb in Before He Was Red (Pebble Press, 2025), her debut novel. The title refers to Abdulhamid’s later nickname, Red (in the sense of bloody), reflecting his use of terror and violence to suppress his enemies. Here he goes by the name Hamid, a choice made in part out of necessity (heirs to the Ottoman throne in the 1870s are not supposed to leave the palace) and in part to conceal his true identity from Flora and from the numerous rebels, mostly students, massing in the streets of Istanbul to protest the actions, or lack thereof, of the government. It’s a tense time, with the Russian Empire stirring up rebellion among the Christian populations of the Balkan states, still officially under Ottoman rule, and the British Empire doing its best to control the Turks both financially and politically. Ståhle does a wonderful job of juggling the historical, political, and romantic plot lines, maneuvering a large cast of characters, some of whom have multiple identities, without ever losing sight of the drama inherent in the romance between Flora and Hamid. Born in London to Swedish parents, Christina Ståhle grew up in various countries—including the UK, Italy, and Saudi Arabia—and speaks four languages. A political scientist, she has lived in Belgium for the last thirty years. Before He Was Red is her debut novel.    C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her latest book, Song of the Silk Weaver, appeared in September 2026. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What keeps political power aimed at the good of those it governs? Melissa Lane, Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton, joins host Ryan Shinkel to discuss her book Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (Princeton UP, 2026). She distinguishes rule, any hierarchical relationship of direction, from office, which is bound by term limits, eligibility requirements, limited powers, and accountability. Lane argues that the Republic, far from Karl Popper’s vision of unconstrained power, is a book about constitutional design: its very title, Politeia, meant a city’s offices and laws, and Plato surrounds his rulers with legal safeguards rather than trusting virtue alone. The conversation also takes up the noble lie, the written law code of the Laws and its dawn-meeting council, and the Statesman’s account of weaving a city divided between hawks and doves — a problem we’d now call polarization. Lane closes on why no AI can do the work of reading Plato for you and an invitation for listeners to live with these texts themselves. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the United States, hundreds of thousands of elected and appointed officials serve more than 50,000 subnational governments, making important decisions about services ranging from education to infrastructure to policing. The provision of critical city services shapes citizens’ everyday lives. Supposedly, local politicians are the elected representatives closest to the people they serve, but are they actually accountable to their constituents? Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that they are not: local elections routinely fail to punish bad politicians or reward strong performers. The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable  argues that this is because urban politics is defined by minimally effective competition, complex institutions that confuse voters, and a lack of effective media coverage. These institutional features combine to stymie even well-intentioned voters and make accountability difficult. Fixing these problems is challenging, but, as de Benedictis-Kessner shows, change is possible if we can enable citizens to reclaim and assert their political power. Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances. Host Ursula Hackett is the Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her award-winning book, America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State is published with Cambridge University Press. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mapping Medical Modernity: Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868–1920 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026) by Professor Susan L. Burns explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tokyo, a city undergoing rapid transformation from the seat of power of the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period to the capital of a modern nation-state and its expanding empire in the Meiji period.   Tracing the development of institutions and policies designed to improve medical care and public health in a dense urban environment, Professor Burns examines tensions between the involved parties—including doctors and policymakers, police and civil officials, residents and those who governed them—and provides case studies focused on three of the city’s major challenges in public health: syphilis, cholera, and mental illness. Drawing upon a wide range of archival materials and contemporary accounts, Dr. Burns also employs geographic information system analysis in mapping the complicated relationships interlinking aspects of the urban environment, social life, public policy, and commercialized medical culture to demonstrate visually how policy decisions and medical capitalism gradually reshaped existing spatial arrangements in the city as well as the social relations that unfolded within them. 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.