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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:
May 30, 2026
How Plague Got Rats
Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without b…
May 30, 2026
American-Designed Shopping Malls in China
China’s remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world’s second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumpt…
May 29, 2026
Scottish Plant Names
Names are incredibly powerful things and are a crucial part of the way we see and classify the world around us. Plant names are especially fasci…
May 29, 2026
Nourishing Networks
For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echo…
May 28, 2026
After Barbary
After Barbary: Algeria's Roles in the French and American Empires (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Timothy Mason Roberts explores the connectio…
May 28, 2026
Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400
The end of the fourteenth century was a time of upheaval and contested authority among the traditional institutions of medieval Europe. In response to…
May 28, 2026
What They Stole
In 1955, following the devastation of the Korean War, Bertha and Harry Holt made headlines for adopting eight Korean children. Driven by evangelical c…
May 27, 2026
Gothic
Castles speak. Especially in an age when they are no longer necessary. The Act of Union of 1800, which brought Ireland into closer association wit…
May 27, 2026
Campus Whisper Networks
Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors (Rutgers University Press, 2026) examines how personal knowledge about student sexu…
May 26, 2026
Finding Mary
During a robbery on 10 March 1844, 14-year-old servant Mary Doherty was murdered in a farmhouse near Culdaff, Co. Donegal. There was no doubt locally …
May 26, 2026
Lost Worlds
There’s a familiar story about us humans: we went from hunting and gathering to farming, wandering bands to villages and cities, clans and chieftains …
May 25, 2026
Glitter
Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter's…
May 24, 2026
Reverberations of Culture
Reverberations of Culture: Racialized Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Musical Variety by Just a Buncha Clowns (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Shane Br…
May 23, 2026
The Celtic World
At the dawn of history the Celts occupied a vast swathe of Europe from Ireland in the west to lands south of the Black Sea in Asia Minor. The stud…
May 23, 2026
Take Freedom
In 1822, Black Charlestonians attempted to overthrow slavery. They were exposed before they could strike, and many were tried and executed in what…
May 23, 2026
Co-Operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective
Co-operative enterprises, which are democratically owned and governed by their workers, customers, or suppliers, have long captured the imagination of…
May 22, 2026
Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship
Since the late nineteenth century, the US federal government has enjoyed exclusive authority to decide whether someone has the ability to enter and …
May 22, 2026
Cut Out
Female artists have long employed collage to reflect the ways in which identity is often constructed from conflicting, contrasting and contradictory p…
May 21, 2026
Orchestrating Power
Orchestrating Power: The American Associational State in the First World War (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores how the expansion of the Am…
May 20, 2026
Emotional Filipinos
In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist …
May 20, 2026
How Film Became History
By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from nearly forty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film sti…
May 19, 2026
Rainforest Radio
In Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon (U Arizona Press, 2025), Dr. Georgia C. Ennis provides a compr…
May 19, 2026
Shakespeare in the Kitchen
Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Ki…
May 18, 2026
Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World
In a world marked by increasingly destructive ecological and meteorological upheavals, Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster,…