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PODCAST

New Books in Language and Translation

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

01:07:39

Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/10/02

Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?In Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order(Columbia UP, 2026)Sasikumar

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00:41:46

Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination with N.S....

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/10/01

Engages with the life and ideas of the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu.In his last, profoundly innovative work Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination, D. R. Nagaraj (1954-1998) engages with the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu, whose enigmatic writings have perplexed many and thus resisted analysis. Nagaraj situates Allama in three intellectual contexts: the medieval philosophical world built around the worship of Shiva; the

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00:29:25

Ilan Stavans on Building Restless Books and...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/09/30

How does an independent press survive by publishing the books the Big Five overlook? Amherst College professor and Spanglish scholar Ilan Stavans joins Sarah Russo to talk about Restless Books, the press he founded to champion immigrant writers, literature in translation, and the books that live between languages. Ilan shares the origin of Restless Books (including the investor who told him to take a finance course first), the creation of the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, and why he

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00:49:45

Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/09/24

Featuring personal essay, manifesto, creative nonfiction, and poetry, Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico(Feminist Press, 2025)gathers the multiplicity of voices being raised in Mexico today against patriarchy and its buried structures. Tackling gender violence, community building, #MeToo, Indigenous rights, and more, these writings rock the core of what we know feminism to be, dismantling its Eurocentric roots and directing its critical thrust towards current affairs in Mexico today.Asserting

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00:57:10

Nathan Wainstein, "Bad Writing in the Modernist...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/09/23

What does it mean for a modernist novel to fail?Modernism famously celebrates rupture, difficulty, and deviance from literary norms—but that very embrace of formal experimentation creates a paradox: how can we tell the difference between daring innovation and genuinely bad writing?Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel (JHU Press, 2026)takes up this long-overlooked question and argues that modernist aesthetics have made artistic failure uniquely difficult to recognize, both in fiction and in literary

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00:28:12

How Were Foreign Languages Taught in Early Modern...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/09/23

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Professor Dr. Natalia Filatkina, Dr. Kerstin Roth and Research Associate Miriam Hinterholzer. All three work at the University of Hamburg in Germany on a long-term research project, called FSL Digital, that investigates language history, language attitudes and everyday communication in the context of multilingualism in early modern Europe.As part of this project, today’s guests annotate and analyse multilingual foreign

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00:58:39

James C. Nieh, "The Language of Bees" (Princeton UP,...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/09/14

With senses that often seem alien to us, bees navigate complex decisions about where to find food, when to fight or flee, and how to work together.The Language of Bees(Princeton University Press, 2026) invites readers into the hidden world of bee communication, a realm where creatures less than an inch long use scent, vibration, movement, and sound to cooperate, share information, and survive.Drawing on decades of groundbreaking fieldwork, Dr. James Nieh sheds light on the remarkable signals that

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00:45:28

Remco E Breuker, "Not Everything Unfolds as...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/09/14

Not Everything Unfolds as Anticipated: Selections from Yi Kyubo’s Tongguk Yi Sangguk Chip (University of Hawaii Press,2026) comprises translations of poems, tales, letters, epitaphs, and funeral orations by Yi Kyubo (1168–1241), the foremost writer and poet of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392). Dr. Breuker’s translation and introduction humanize this celebrated poet, whom he reveals as not only a great writer, but a doggedly ambitious man with a reputation for drinking, a son weighed down by his family’s

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39:42

Linguistic Unease in Healthcare

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/09/02

In this episode of theLanguage on the MovePodcast,BrynnQuickchats withDr. Nicole Marinaro, a sociolinguist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg. Her work explores how language policies shape people's experiences of accessing healthcare and other public services. Dr. Marinaro’s research focuses on linguistic justice, examining how communication barriers affect patients who speak a language other than the majority language and how these barriers can lead to unequal access to care

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52:13

Speech and the City

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/26

In this episode of theLanguage on the MovePodcast, Ingrid Piller speaks withYaron Matrasabout his new bookSpeech and the City.In this timely book, Yaron shows that cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarization by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. The book traces the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism and helps forge a civic identity. He critiques linguaphobic discourses at a national level that regard

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34:10

Eran Shalev, "The Star-Spangled Republic: Political...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/24

Why does the American flag use stars to represent the states? InThe Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation(U Virginia Press, 2025), Eran Shalev answers this and many other questions, considering the cosmic imagery—so familiar today but so peculiar on reflection—that suffused the United States’ early political culture. In this comprehensive study, Shalev uncovers how “political astronomy”—the discussion and representation of politics through

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45:25

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/20

Deciphering the Hidden Meaning: Language and the Highest Good in Early Advaita Vedānta(Oxford UP, 2026)presents a transformative history of one of the most significant ideas in Indian philosophy: liberation. Taking the great philosopher Śaṅkara as the focal point, Aleksandar Uskokov analyzes the relationship between liberation, language, and scripture. While modern portraits of Śaṅkara often cast him as a mystic or a religious reformer, the book paints a more complex portrait of the historical

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35:26

Taking The Scenic Route To High Quality Education For...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/19

In this episode of theLanguage on the MovePodcast,Dr Agnes Bodistalks to Hannah Madin and Catherine White. Hannah is a Teaching and Learning Officer at the Department of Education in the Northern Territory (Australia), and Catherine White is a Teaching and Learning Coach in secondary education.We are zooming in on learning English as an additional language or dialect in remote communities in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT). There are numerous Aboriginal languages spoken there as well as

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70:29

A Very Jewish Christmas: When Jesus Spoke Yiddish

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/18

It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these translations in the twentieth century, when new conceptions of the Yiddish language, new cosmopolitanism

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66:02

Are We In The Midst Of A Yiddish Renaissance?

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/15

Are we currently experiencing a Yiddish renaissance? This is one of the questions we are often asked at YIVO. YIVO’s own community of Yiddish learners has expanded more than 10-fold in the last two years. Duolingo has added Yiddish as a language. Headline after headline touts Yiddish as unexpectedly alive and well. What does this all mean for Yiddish in the 21st century?Join YIVO for a conversation about the Yiddish world today. Led by YIVO’s Director of Public Programs Alex Weiser, this program

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51:24

Michael R. Griffiths, "The Death of the Author and...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/12

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key

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42:30

Huang Chongkai, "The Formosa Exchange" (Honford Star,...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/12

In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk withJeremy Tiangabout his English translation ofThe Formosa Exchange(Honford Star, 2026)—which will be released on September 18, 2026 (but isavailable for preorder).Tiang is a novelist, playwright, and translator based in New York. He has translated more than thirty books from Chinese to English—including Zou Jingzhi'sNinth Building, longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize—and has served as a judge for the National Book Award for

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46:15

Tsering Döndrup, "The Red Wind Howls" (Columbia UP,...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/10

The Red Wind Howls(ColumbiaUP, 2025)is an unsettling, gripping, and darkly funny novel by Tsering Döndrup, one of modern Tibet’s most celebrated writers. First self-published in 2006 after no publisher was willing to take the political risk, the novel traces Tibetan experiences under Mao Zedong’s rule, from the 1958 Amdo uprising and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Through a nonsequential narrative that moves back and forth between characters and events,The Red Wind Howlsweaves

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62:28

Yiddish Language During the Holocaust

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/05

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Holocaust, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words –KhurbnYiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in

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31:59

Abdelwahab Meddeb, "Returns to Marrakesh / Retour à...

New Books in Language and Translation ·

2026/08/01

Abdelwahab Meddeb’sReturns to Marrakesh, co-translated by Claudia Esposito and Laura Reeck and published by Syracuse University Press in 2026, chronicles Meddeb’s successive visits to the Red City from 1968 through the 1990s, tracing both his personal journey and Marrakesh’s transformation across three pivotal decades. Through his distinctive blend of poetic prose and attentive observation, Meddeb portrays the city as a historical crossroads shaped by Jewish and Muslim communities, different social

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