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About Miranda Melcher
I have had the pleasure of interviewing over 1,300 authors on the New Books Network, on a range of topics! I tend to interview authors of interdisciplinary books that seek to interrogate and subvert preconceptions about elements of history that have either been neglected in scholarship, or authors who are analysing history through a novel lens.
You can follow all of my episodes on the channel New Books with Miranda Melcher, available on all podcast players.
I completed my PhD in Defense Studies at King's College London, where I researched how to negotiate and implement peace treaties. My book on the topic was released in April 2024 from Bloomsbury: Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique. Prior to my PhD, I earned an MA in Intelligence and International Security from the Department of War Studies at King's College London and a BA in Political Science from Yale University.
Dr. Miranda Melcher (Ph.D. in Defense Studies from Kings College London) is the host of New Books with Miranda Melcher where she interviews authors on a wide range of books related to history and politics.
NBN Episodes hosted by Miranda:
July 8, 2026
Cookstove Chronicles
Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to …
July 8, 2026
Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri
In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970 (LSU Press, 2026), Dr. Gregg Andrews examin…
July 8, 2026
Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England
In the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society. In …
July 5, 2026
21st Century Yakuza
Once dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of…
July 4, 2026
Financial Inclusion
The number of people in the world with a bank account or money service provider increased by 2 billion over the past decade. This phenomenon ref…
July 4, 2026
Vanished
Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of…
July 3, 2026
Smell
The sense of smell is often linked to the dark, the antisocial, the primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. Today we live in an a…
July 3, 2026
Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan
Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024 (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Xian Aubin Wang investigates …
July 2, 2026
The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared
Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurpris…
July 1, 2026
Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire
Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire: Family, Law and War (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Kate Dannies examines the gender and fam…
July 1, 2026
Insatiable Appetites
In Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London (Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Peter Ross, step into the kitchens, streets and chop houses…
June 30, 2026
Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul
Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, includi…
June 30, 2026
Doom Town, USA
In March 1953 and May 1955, government officials—including the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), the US Department of Defense, and the Atom…
June 29, 2026
Dream Road to Pan America
A century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its story remains largely unknown—even to the hundreds of motorists who annually attempt…
June 29, 2026
News Machines
British daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century, ballooning in size and radically reorganizing staffing and p…
June 26, 2026
Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting
Between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on …
June 16, 2026
The Hobo
From the mid-nineteenth century through the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, a new kind of migrant worker became a familiar sight in communiti…
June 9, 2026
Shanghai
Home to 25 million people, Shanghai is the most populous and wealthiest city in China. A meeting point between China and the wider world, the city …
June 8, 2026
Translating hell
In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of …
June 8, 2026
Explosivity
Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity: Following What Remains (U Minnesota Press, 2025) unearths the hidden leg…
June 6, 2026
Walmart
Walmart: Made in China (Stanford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Eileen Otis tells the story of Walmart's expansion in China, making the case that…
June 6, 2026
Smog and Sunshine
Los Angeles and smog have been synonymous for decades. From the 1940s through the 1980s, children breathed air so heavy with lead that their blood…
June 5, 2026
Connoisseurs and Conmen
Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lewis Ryder…
June 5, 2026
Microphone
Since its invention more than 150 years ago, the microphone transformed the world in an instant. Yet its evolution and integration into our daily li…