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PODCAST

New Books in Popular Culture

Interviews with Scholars of Popular Culture about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

society & culture

All Episodes

64:50

Paul R. Laird and Elizabeth A. Wells, "The Cambridge...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/25

Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of musical and dramatic achievement. It not only helped define a generation of musical theatre lovers but is among the handful of shows that have contributed to our understanding of American musical identity at mid-century. Bringing together contemporary scholars in music, theatre, dance, literature, and performance, The Cambridge Companion to West

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37:25

Adam Kotsko, "Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/24

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by Dr. Adam Kotsko explores the beloved science fiction franchise’s repeated attempts to reinvent itself after the end of its 1990s golden age. Beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity—including authorized books, the three “Kelvin Timeline” films, and the streaming series Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and

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32:58

Clive Bloom, "London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/18

From Kensington to the East End, under candlelight, gas lamp and then neon signs, London is both a bustling physical metropolis and a stirring psychic encounter. The most depraved depictions of London in fiction, film, poetry, television and theatre have irrevocably merged with the reality of its dark history, creating a phantasmagoria defined by murder, vice and the unnatural. In this panoptic look at the capital at its most eerie and macabre, Dr. Clive Bloom takes a tour of Gothic London's uncanny

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69:31

Matt Lodder, "Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/17

There is a pervasive stereotype of tattoo culture as relating to an underworld of scoundrels, sailors, and ne’er-do-wells, yet it has existed in the West as a professionalized art practice for centuries. Drawing on extensive new research and unprecedented access to largely unpublished private archives of photographs, art, and ephemera, in Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Matt Lodder offers a new perspective on the history of commercial tattooing in Europe

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43:20

Mia Consalvo et al., "Streaming by the Rest of Us:...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/15

The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025) Dr. Mia Consalvo, Dr. Marc Lajeunesse, and Dr. Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are

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68:00

Fiona Handyside, "Girls' Hairstories: Sparkle and...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/14

Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen’s Power Plait to JoJo Siwa’s outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures? What do they tell us about how girlhood combines the qualities of resilience and sparkle needed to survive and thrive in turbulent post-recessionary times?Drawing together analysis of popular film franchises, Disney animation, ground-breaking TV shows, music videos, girl celebrity personas and global

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37:55

Martha Bayless, "Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/11

The people of early England (c. 450–1100 CE) enjoyed numerous kinds of entertainment, recreation and pleasure, but the scattered records of such things have made the larger picture challenging to assemble. Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning in Early England (Cambridge University Press, 2025) by Dr. Martha Bayless illuminates the merrier aspects of early English life, extending our understanding of the full range of early medieval English culture. It shows why entertainment and festivity were not

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51:14

Ariane Sherine, "The Real Sinéad O'Connor" (White...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/08

Sinéad O'Connor, renowned for her angelic voice and activism, overcame a tumultuous upbringing to become a global protest singer and advocate for social justice.O'Connor achieved worldwide success as an angel-voiced, shaven-headed Irish singer of heartfelt songs, but she was far more than just a pop star - she was also an activist and a survivor. Reeling from a troubled childhood at the hands of her violent mother, she spent 18 months living in a former Magdalene Laundry due to her truancy and

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52:47

Sarah Stang, et al., "Monstrosity in Games and Play"...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/07

Sarah Stang, editor, joins Jana Byars to talk about Monstrosity in Games and Play (Amsterdam UP, 2024). Monsters fascinate us. From ancient folklore to contemporary digital games, they are at the core of the stories we tell. They reflect our fears, deepest desires, and the monstrosity hidden within ourselves. Monsters hold a mirror to our contemporary society and reveal who we truly are. This edited collection examines monsters and monstrosity in games and play. Monsters are a key feature of most

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26:41

Richard Heppner, "Woodstock: From World War to...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/07

Few towns in America are as famous as Woodstock, New York—although Woodstock may be most famous for an event that happened many miles away! Long before the 1969 Woodstock festival put the town on the map, it had been a center for artists and free thinkers who found refuge in its rural setting. Longtime citizens were often shocked by the arrival of these newcomers who brought new values and attitudes to their once-isolated village. From the transformative arrival of artists in the early twentieth

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57:27

Chris Alexander, "Art! Trash! Terror! Adventures in...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/06

ART! TRASH! TERROR! Adventures in Strange Cinema (Headpress 2025) by Chris Alexander is a treasure trove of in-depth essays and edifying interviews that celebrate some of the most eccentric and unforgettable movies in cult cinema history. From recognized classics (George A. Romero's Dawn Of The Dead, David Lynch's The Elephant Man) to misunderstood masterpieces (Michael Mann's The Keep, Boris Sagal's The Omega Man) to unfairly maligned curios (Kostas Karagiannis' Land Of The Minotaur, Brett

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71:59

Alfie Bown, "Post-Comedy" (Polity, 2025)

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/05

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge. Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and

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40:13

Blair Farrell, "The Avengers in Video Games"...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/05

For decades, Marvel Comics' superhero group the Avengers have captured the imagination of millions, whether in comics, multi-billion dollar grossing films or video games. Similar to the chronology of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Avengers video games first started with titles driven by single characters, like Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor and Captain America. Over time, the games grew to include more and more heroes, culminating in playing experiences that featured the Avengers assembled. The

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20:09

Kyle Orland, "Minesweeper" (Boss Fight Books, 2023)

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/04

If you had some free time and a Windows PC in the 1990s, your mouse probably crawled its way to Minesweeper, an exciting watch-where-you-click puzzle game with a ticking clock and a ton of “just one more game” replayability. Originally sold as part of a “big box” bundle of simple games, Minesweeper became a cornerstone of the Windows experience when it was pre-installed with every copy of Windows 3.1 and decades of subsequent OS updates. Alongside fellow Windows gaming staple Solitaire, Minesweeper

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33:11

Waiyee Loh, "Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/03

Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian Narratives in the Global Creative Economy (SUNY Press, 2024) by Dr. Waiyee Loh brings together contemporary representations of Victorian Britain to reveal how the nation's imperial past inheres in the ways post-imperial subjects commodify and consume "culture" in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The globalization of English literature, along with British forms of dress, etiquette, and dining, in the nineteenth century presumed and produced the

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36:05

Robert Houghton, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games:...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/03

Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that is not only different, but in certain aspects, more profound than traditional literary or cinematic forms of medievalism. However, although it is important to understand the versions of the Middle Ages presented by these games, how players engage with these medievalist worlds, and why particular representational trends emerge in this most modern

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59:41

Hallie Franks, "Ancient Sculpture and...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/03/02

Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood: Venus Envy (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Hallie Franks examines the reception of Graeco-Roman sculptures of Venus and their role in the construction of the body aesthetics of the “fit” American woman in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. In this historical moment, 19th-century anthropometric methods, the anti-corset dress reform movement and early fitness culture were united in their goal of identifying and producing healthy,

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58:16

Mike Sielski, "Magic in the Air: The Myth, the...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/02/26

The evolution of basketball, and much of the social and cultural change in America, can be traced through one powerful act on the court: the slam dunk. The dunk's history is the story of a sport and a country changed by the most dominant act in basketball, and it makes Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk (St. Martin's Press, 2025) a rollicking and insightful piece of narrative history and a surefire classic of sports literature.When basketball was the province of

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46:55

William Burns, "Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/02/25

The future ain't what it used to be.Is nostalgia revitalizing or killing 21st-century culture? The concept of nostalgia has seeped into almost all aspects of modern-day media, none more so than horror culture and its borderlands of Hauntology, Folk Horror, and found footage film. From film and TV franchises building endlessly on past glories, to musicians whose work now spans decades, modern media borrows heavily from the past. Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of

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76:31

In “The Beast,” AI Puts Limits on Human Emotion

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/02/22

It’s the UConn Popcast, and “The Beast” is a 2023 sci fi / romance movie by French director Bertrand Bonello, in which artificial intelligence has determined that human emotions are a danger, and must be surgically controlled. In this deep dive, we ask whether this is really a film about AI, a transhistorical love story, a narrative of societal decline, or something else entirely. The Beast stars Lea Seydoux and George McKay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our

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1,324 results

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