Support Kritika | Support H-Net | Buy Books Here | Join the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!
Interviews with scholars of public health about their new books
In American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (U Georgia Press, 2026), Dr. Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How h…
Using the analytical framework of reproductive justice, Borders, Citizenship, and Pregnancy: Migrant Women’s Experiences of Pregnancy and Maternity Ca…
Europe's Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cornell UP, 2025) is a history of eighteenth-century naturalists and physicians …
Religion, Spirituality and Public Health: Competing and Complementary Epistemes (British Academy, 2025) focuses on exploring the role of different 'wa…
Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, captur…
Between May 1 and May 22, 1863, Union soldiers marched nearly 200 miles through the hot, humid countryside to assault and capture the fortified city o…
We often think of medieval medicine as strange, unhygienic and unscientific, but The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Katherin…
In an era dominated by visual information, what can the sounds of a pandemic reveal about crisis and care? How might attuning to sonic atmospheres unc…
In Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid de…
Our guest today is Steffan Blayney, the author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body. In Heal…
A powerful blend of deeply human stories and rigorous research, The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health (Beacon Press, 2026) …
Hypochondria: In Sickness and in Story (Reaktion, 2026) proposes a bold reimagining of a frequently dismissed condition. Dr. Susannah B. Mintz reframe…
With fasting at an all-time high in popularity, here is an enlightening exploration into the history, science, and philosophy behind the practice—esse…
In Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2026), philosopher Jacob Stegenga breaks with the most dominant …
In Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights (Legacy Lit, 2026) reporter Amy Littlefield investigates the secret k…
A hard-hitting exposé of how methadone clinics fail people in recovery—and an urgent, unapologetic case for their abolition. Methadone is a life-sav…
Dr. Hanna Pickard has written a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction. Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destructively? W…
The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line (U Chicago Press, 2025) is a compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of re…
Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the populat…
How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction--until America's opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of p…