New Books Network
Geography
History November 30, 2020

Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance

Jeremy M. Black

Hosted by Charles Coutinho
History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the …

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Geography November 24, 2020

Seeds of Power

Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina

Amalia Leguizamón

Hosted by Stentor Danielson
In 1996 Argentina adopted genetically modified (GM) soybeans as a central part of its national development strategy. Today, Argentina is the third largest global grower and exporter of GM crops …
History November 23, 2020

The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland

Dale Kedwards

Hosted by Joshua Tham
The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of …
Geography November 23, 2020

Lessons in Environmental Justice

From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More

Michael Mascarenhas

Hosted by Stentor Danielson
Michael Mascarenhas's book Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More (Sage, 2020) provides an entry point to the field by bringing together …
Digital Humanities November 18, 2020

Historical Atlas of Hasidism

Marcin Wodziński and Waldemar Spallek

Hosted by Marshall Poe
The Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton UP, 2018) is the first cartographic reference book on one of the modern era’s most vibrant and important mystical movements. Featuring seventy-four large-format maps …
Literary Studies November 10, 2020

Extraterritorial

A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction

Matthew Hart

Hosted by Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed
Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores how texts—literary and visual—help us engage with the space that goes beyond the limits of visible geographical borders …
African American Studies November 4, 2020

Black in Place

The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City

Brandi Thompson Summers

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this …
Art November 3, 2020

Art Schools and Place

Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes

Silvie Jacobi

Hosted by Dave O'Brien
What is an art school? In Art Schools and Place: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Dr Silvie Jacobi, a researcher and head of education …
Geography October 29, 2020

Mapping Crisis

Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping

Doug Specht

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the …
Latin American Studies October 16, 2020

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met

Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America

Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr.

Hosted by Grant Kleiser
In his new book, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (UNC Press, 2020), Dr. Jeffrey Erbig charts the interplay between imperial and indigenous spatial imaginaries …
Caribbean Studies October 14, 2020

Audible Geographies in Latin America

Sounds of Race and Place

Dylon Robbins

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
What is the relationship between race, technology and sound? How can we access the ways that Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought about, and importantly, heard …
American Studies October 7, 2020

Fixing Niagara Falls

Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall

Daniel Macfarlane

Hosted by Jason Newton
Water and diplomatic historian Dan MacFarlane has written a fascinating book on a fundamental debate in environmental history: What is a natural landscape? Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers …
Geography October 7, 2020

Ruling the Savage Periphery

Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State

Benjamin D. Hopkins

Hosted by Jonathan Megerian
Intrinsic to the practice of empire is the creation of boundaries. We tend to think of such boundaries as borders, physical lines of demarcation past which the empire’s sovereignty has …
Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel October 7, 2020

The Geography of Genius

Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places

Eric Weiner

Hosted by Renee Garfinkel
Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for …
Indian Ocean World October 1, 2020

Transregional Trade and Traders

Situating Gujarat in the Indian Ocean from Early Times to 1900

E. A. Alpers and C. Goswami (eds.)

Hosted by Kelvin Ng
Blessed with numerous safe harbors, accessible ports, and a rich hinterland, Gujarat has been central to the history of Indian Ocean maritime exchange that involved not only goods, but also …
Southeast Asian Studies September 22, 2020

Going Nowhere Fast

Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality

Sabina Lawreniuk and Laurie Parsons

Hosted by D. Kadich
Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality (Oxford UP, 2020) brings together more than a decade’s worth of research during one of the most consequential moments in …
East Asian Studies September 21, 2020

Last Days of the Mighty Mekong

Brian Eyler

Hosted by Patrick Jory
The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all …
South Asian Studies September 16, 2020

Shareholder Cities

Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India

Sai Balakrishnan

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
In the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Professor of City and Urban Planning …
East Asian Studies September 8, 2020

Beyond the Steppe Frontier

A History of the Sino-Russian Border

Sören Urbansky

Hosted by Ed Pulford
The fact that the vast border between China and Russia is often overlooked goes hand-in-hand with a lack of understanding of the ordinary citizens in these much-discussed places, who often …
European Studies August 25, 2020

Contesting Europe

Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses on Europe, 1400–1800

N. Detering and I. Walser-Bürgler,

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
While the term ‘Europe’ was used sporadically in ancient and medieval times, it proliferated between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and gained a prevalence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries …