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About Miranda Melcher
I completed my PhD in Defense Studies at King's College London, where I researched how to negotiate and implement peace treaties. My book is forthcoming in 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.I have had the pleasure of interviewing over 400 authors on the New Books Network, on a range of topics! I tend to interview authors of 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.
Dr. Miranda Melcher (Ph.D., Defense Studies, Kings College, London) studies post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with deep analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
NBN Episodes hosted by Miranda:
April 23, 2024
Free Time
Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park…
April 23, 2024
Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing
How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such d…
April 22, 2024
England's Jews
In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied importa…
April 22, 2024
Libertine London
Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Julie Peakman investigates the sex lives of women from 1680 to 1830…
April 21, 2024
Confinement
Covering a fascinating period of population growth, high infant mortality and deep social inequality, rapid medical advances and pseudoscientific quac…
April 21, 2024
Migrants Who Care
As the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increase…
April 20, 2024
War and Conflict in the Middle Ages
In War and Conflict in the Middle Ages (Polity, 2022), Dr. Stephen Morillo offers the first global history of armed conflict between 540 and 1500 or a…
April 20, 2024
Electric Dreams
In the future, we’ll all be having sex with robots… won’t we? Roboticists say they’re a distracting science fiction, yet endless books, films and art…
April 20, 2024
Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez
Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV (Yale University Press, 2024) by Dr. Amanda Wunder is the first archival s…
April 19, 2024
Senses of Space in the Early Modern World
How did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those exp…
April 19, 2024
Elena, Princesa of the Periphery
In the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Elena, Princess of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (…
April 18, 2024
Recognition Politics
Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lorenza B. Fontana is a pioneering …
April 17, 2024
Wholesale Couture
Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70 (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Liz Tregenza seeks to revise the notion that wholesale couturiers were simply …
April 16, 2024
How the Spanish Empire Was Built
Sixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had e…
April 16, 2024
A History of the World in 10 Dinners
For every lover of food culture, A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes (Rizzoli, 2023) by Victoria Flexner and Jay Reifel pre…
April 15, 2024
Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge
In 1845 an expedition led by Sir John Franklin vanished in the Canadian Arctic. The enduring obsession with the Franklin mystery, and in particular In…
April 14, 2024
Mask
From the theatre mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument fo…
April 13, 2024
Space Rover
In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit and vision many equated…
April 13, 2024
State-Building as Lawfare
State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Egor Lazarev explores the use o…
April 12, 2024
Aftershock
In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a m…
April 11, 2024
The Lettered Indian
Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Ed…
April 8, 2024
On Amistà
Although we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late mediaeval Christian so…
April 7, 2024
Deeping It
Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill (404 Ink, 2023) by Adèle Oliver shines a critical light on UK drill and its fraught rel…
April 6, 2024
The Jews of Summer
In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic …