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PODCAST

New Books in Communications

Interviews with Scholars of Media and Communications about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

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All Episodes

50:39

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez ed., "Media Travels: Toward an...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/22

Media Travels: Toward An Atlas of Global Media (Amherst College Press, 2025) fills a significant gap in global media scholarship by offering short, readable articles covering different types of media from around the world. Through careful and informed analysis, these eleven accessibly written chapters illustrate the particularities of different media practices and situate them within social, historical, and geographical contexts. Examples range from South African video games to Korean TV series

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56:41

"Assignment Moscow" with author James Rodgers

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/20

Is it possible to do independent journalism in today’s Russia? “The short answer is no,” James Rodgers tells me in our conversation about his insightful and scrupulously researched book Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Rodgers is a former BBC correspondent in Moscow. We first talk about Western coverage of the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union, when many foreign correspondents, famously John Reed, openly identified with

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44:32

Rob Goodman, "Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/19

Why is political rhetoric broken – and how can it be fixed? Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions (Cambridge University Press, 2022) returns to the origins of rhetoric to recover the central place of eloquence in political thought. Eloquence, for the orators of classical antiquity, emerged from rhetorical relationships that exposed both speaker and audience to risk. Through close readings of Cicero – and his predecessors, rivals, and successors – political theorist and former speechwriter Rob

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64:04

Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/17

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy.Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and

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42:56

Transhuman Horror in Alien: Earth

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/16

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and today we react to the first two episodes of Alien: Earth. We break down the themes and ideas in the series, focusing on its central questions of transhumanism, the Peter Pan mythology, and the dream / nightmare imagery. We consider how this series is consistent with and differs from the Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) movies, particularly on the central political and ideological problematics invoked. We further consider the nature and motivations of Wendy and the

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34:47

David de Boer, "The Early Modern Dutch Press in an...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/15

David de Boer returns to the podcast to talk to Jana Byars about his first book, The Early Modern Dutch Press in the Age of Religious Persecution (Oxford UP, 2023). This book is available open source here. For victims of persecution around the world, attracting international media attention for their plight is often a matter of life and death. This study takes us back to the news revolution of seventeenth-century Europe, when people first discovered in the press a powerful new weapon to combat

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30:29

Matthew Facciani, "Misguided: Where Misinformation...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/14

Why are people inclined to believe misinformation? Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do about It (Columbia UP, 2025) is a wide-ranging and comprehensive book that shines a light on how false beliefs take root and spread, exploring the cognitive, emotional, and social factors that make us all susceptible to misinformation. Challenging approaches that focus solely on education and media literacy, Matthew Facciani emphasizes the important role identities and social

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61:34

Jirí Anger, "Towards a Film Theory from Below:...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/12

Jiří Anger is a scholar, archivist, and videographic critic devoted, as he says in this interview, to "making weird shapes shine." In this episode of New Books in Film, Anger sits down with Alix Beeston to discuss his award-winning book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up. Anger's book is an experiment in theorizing film "from below," from the perspective of moving-image objects themselves. Its revelatory readings of single frames from the digitized

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62:14

Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/09

If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example of how the region is stereotyped and misunderstood, particularly in films. In her book, Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film(University of Georgia Press, 2018), Meredith McCarroll, Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College, describes Appalachian people as being shown as different from both white and nonwhite groups, often considered as

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24:13

Nathan Wainstein, "Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/08

Grant Us Eyes is a book-length close reading of Bloodborne by literary critic Nathan Wainstein (LA Review of Books, Cartridge Lit, American Book Review). Grant Us Eyes situates the game’s oft-discussed difficulty in relation to a much longer tradition of difficult art – surrealist painting, the modernist novel, etc. Wainstein probes the difficulty of Bloodborne’s fragmented narrative, the difficulty of its graphical and aural glitches, the difficulty of the philosophical problems it poses, and the

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56:37

The Social Impact of Automating Translation

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/03

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Esther Monzó-Nebot, Associate Professor in Translation and Interpreting Studies at Universitat Jaume I in Catalunya. They talk about Dr. Monzó-Nebot's new book The Social Impact of Automating Translation: An Ethics of Care Perspective on Machine Translation. The conversation delves into ideological issues involved in the widespread use of machine translation and the real-life impact for those who may rely on machine

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48:11

Bradley Morgan, "Frank Zappa's America" (LSU Press,...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/02

From his early albums with the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa established a reputation as a musical genius who pushed the limits of culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s, experimenting with a blend of genres in innovative and unheard-of ways. Not only did his exploratory styles challenge the expectations of what popular music could sound like, but his prolific creative endeavors also shaped how audiences thought about the freedom of artistic expression. In Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press,

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52:19

Y. Kokosalakis and F. J. Leira-Castiñeira, "Violence...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/02

Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars explores the complex interplay between violence and propaganda during the continent's major civil conflicts in the first half of the 20th century. The book, edited by Yiannis Kokosalakis and Francisco J. Leira Castiñeira, uses a multidisciplinary approach to analyze how propaganda both reflected and fueled violence in conflicts like those in Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Greece. In essence, the book argues that violence during European

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70:48

Suruchi Mazumdar, "Divided Media: Politics and...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/02

Suruchi Mazumdar’s book addresses the complex relationship between India’s evolving, emerging media landscape, the political and economic interests of diverse media actors, and movements opposing contentious issues such as market-based economic reforms and religious nationalism. In the mid-2000s, Singur and Nandigram, nondescript semi-urban and rural areas in the east Indian state of West Bengal, suddenly became the center of national and international media attention and debates on state-led

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67:47

Gavin Williams, "Format Friction: Perspectives on the...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/08/01

With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly became an industrial standard even while the gramophone itself

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49:46

Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L....

New Books in Communications ·

2025/07/30

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to advance and define African American citizenship. Among the vanguard of the Black press was Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, founder and editor of The Liberator newspaper. His Los Angeles-based newspaper championed for women's rights, land and business ownership, education, and civic engagement, while condemning lynchings and other violent acts against African

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40:05

Nadya Bair, "The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/07/26

The legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which these

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38:34

Cameron Kunzelman, "The World is Born from Zero:...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/07/23

The World is Born From Zero is an investigation into the relationship between video games and science fiction through the philosophy of speculation. Cameron Kunzelman (Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, USA) argues that the video game medium is centered on the evaluation and production of possible futures by following video game studies, media philosophy, and science fiction studies to their furthest reaches. Claiming that the best way to understand games is through rigorous formal analysis of their

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78:36

Brian Fauteux, "Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/07/23

Years before the advent of music streaming, Sirius and XM established satellite radio services that attracted paying subscribers through their ever-expanding lineup of niche music channels and exclusive celebrity-hosted programming. Brian Fauteux's Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in the Streaming Space Age (University of California Press, 2025) is the first book to explore how satellite radio bridges legacy broadcast music radio and streaming platforms, serving as both precursor and integral player

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63:03

Kelefa Sanneh, "Major Labels: A History of Popular...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/07/20

Kelefa Sanneh was born in England, and lived in Ghana and Scotland before moving with his parents to the United States in the early 1980s. He was a pop music critic at the New York Times from 2000-2008, and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since then. His first book, just released on Penguin, is called Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. The book refracts the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years through the big genres that have defined and

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