New Books in Communications

Whether print or digital, text or image, artistic or scientific, rare or common, historic or contemporary, most of the content we encounter contains accidental mistakes—ranging from typos to factual errors to errors arising from prejudicial assumptions—and a significant proportion of it also contains deliberate misinformation resulting from various forms of forgery, fakery, and piracy. In Forgers, Fakers, and Publisher-Pirates (U Alberta Press, 2025), Linda Quirk introduces the work of notorious and lesser-known forgers, reveals the various ways in which experts and authors have faked their own identities—ranging from carefully-selected pseudonyms to falsified ethnicities to fraudulent credentials—and explores a number of shady publishing practices. We can all become better readers and better at protecting ourselves from scammers by improving our understanding of the nature of the content before us. Linda Quirk is a librarian (Bruce Peel Special Collections, University of Alberta, Edmonton) whose research and publications focus on a group of women who, in the nineteenth century, did pioneering work in various fields and whose writings helped to break down the barriers then preventing women from full participation in Canadian society. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Yiben Ma, lecturer in international communications and co-editor/contributor to the new Routledge handbook, researches political communication, online Chinese nationalism, and sports and communication. He discusses the handbook’s focus on digital transformation, regional comparisons across PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, shifts in online nationalism, pandemic-era media changes, and emerging methods and topics in Chinese media studies.

Caillan Davenport, Roman historian and ANU professor, explores how rumor and gossip shaped perceptions of emperors across seven centuries. He discusses sources like graffiti and songs. Conversations cover how talk circulated, sparked protests, shaped succession stories, and how rulers tried to manage reputation.

Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, such as a free speech entropy: the perception of rulers or governments that if speech is not restricted then social or political decline or disorder is inevitable. Mchangama also notes how restrictions usually have the unintended effect of emboldening the speakers and making the forbidden speech even more attractive to potential listeners. This history also reveals advocates of free speech less familiar to Western readers, such as the ninth-century Persian scholar Ibn al-Rawandi, a theologian and later skeptic whose life illustrates the debates possible in medieval Islam. Mchangama reviews the modern debates regarding freedom of thought and the latest iterations of arguments about whether free speech will lead to social decline and chaos. Mchangama is a champion of free speech but his history provides a fair minded account of the concerns of speech restrictionists throughout history.Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the emergence and development of samizdat, a significant and distinctive phenomenon of the late Soviet era that provided an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. In bringing together research into the underground journals, bulletins, art folios, and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi reveals how samizdat helped to foster new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Komaromi’s approach combines literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory to show that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime, but a platform for developing informal communities of knowledge. In this way, samizdat foreshadowed the various ways in which alternative perspectives are expressed to challenge the authority of institutions around the world today.Ann Komaromi is a Professor within the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Acting Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her interests include alternative publishing, underground networks and nonconformist literature and art, especially in the Soviet Union after Stalin.Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Betto van Waarden, a historian and professor at Maastricht University, dives into the interplay between mass media and politics from 1890 to the First World War. He discusses how politicians adapted to a rapidly changing media landscape, using examples like Roosevelt and Leopold II. Betto highlights how transnational media redefined public perception and political legitimacy, and he connects historical phenomena to contemporary issues like disinformation and social media dynamics. His exploration reveals the enduring influence of 'publicity politicians' on today’s media strategies.

Emily Hund, a research affiliate at the University of Pennsylvania, explores the rise of social media influencers in her new book. She discusses how the 2008 recession pushed many into digital content creation, reshaping personal branding. Hund highlights the paradox of authenticity in the influencer industry, revealing that those perceived as 'real' are often skilled at navigating its complexities. The conversation also touches on the social impact of influencers, mental health challenges, and the rise of activism in response to global calls for change.

Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford UP, 2025) offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spread its message across an expanding nation. One of the era's largest media corporations and a pillar of the benevolent empire, the ATS circulated some 5.6 billion printed pages between its founding in 1825 and the eve of the Civil War. It wasn't just the volume of materials that mattered—it was the sophisticated media infrastructure that evangelicals developed for their message to reach readers, coast to coast. Media infrastructure refers to the material assemblages that work below the surface of media content, including the format of publications, the avenues of their movement, and the circumstances surrounding their reading. As a non-coercive yet effective form of power, infrastructure shaped how, when, and why readers engaged with evangelical texts. While showing how the ATS became a formidable force in American society during the nineteenth century, Empire of Print opens larger questions about the entanglements among people, things, texts, and institutions, the dynamics of power in a media-saturated world, and the salience of race, class, and region in the distribution and reception of media. Sonia Hazard is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Noam Sienna, a leading scholar of Jewish culture, explores the intricate world of Jewish books in North Africa. He reveals how these texts knitted together diverse Sephardic communities across regions like Fez, Tunis, and Livorno. Sienna highlights the shift from manuscripts to print, the evolving identity of Sephardic culture, and the often-overlooked labor of scribes and correctors. He also discusses the emotional significance of books post-expulsion and teases his upcoming project on Ottoman Sephardi printing, promising more fascinating insights into a rich cultural history.

Scott W. Gregory, an Associate Professor and co-director of the Center for East Asian Studies, dives deep into the transformative world of print in early modern China through the lens of the classic novel, The Water Margin. He discusses how this beloved tale of outlaw heroes was adapted by different editors, highlighting the moral complexity and ambiguities in its various editions. Gregory uncovers the role of commercial publishers in reshaping meanings and reveals how Ming print culture made the text malleable rather than fixed.