New Books Network

Leslie Barnes, Associate Professor of French Studies at ANU who studies Cambodian and Vietnamese literature and film. She discusses how fiction and film stage ambivalence around sex work under imperialism. Topics include colonial and rescue narratives, Rithy Panh’s documentary strategies, debates over terminology, sex tourism, cross-border marriage, and archival oral histories.

Melissa Butcher, a professor and program director who conducted extensive fieldwork across the US, explores how competing meanings of freedom polarize Americans. She discusses rural/urban divides, the El Paso border crossings, conservative youth organizing, COVID-related medical freedom, and local efforts that bridge deep disagreements.

Dana Mele, YA author of The Beast You Let In, writes tense queer coming-of-age horror. She discusses twins and dual identity, rural isolation shaping queer danger, spiritualism and Ouija research, crafting Veronica’s voice through diary poems, multiple POVs and portraying neurodivergence authentically.

Dominik Berrens, classicist and scholar of Neo-Latin and early modern science, explores how terminology for natural history formed. He traces Latin’s dominance, the use of Greek, Arabic, vernaculars and indigenous names. He recounts naming practices for New World and microscopic organisms. He highlights debates, accidental coinages, and the surprising non-scientific forces behind technical terms.

Douglas H. Erwin, retired Smithsonian paleobiologist and Santa Fe Institute researcher, explores how novelty and innovation differ across biology, culture, and technology. He outlines a four-phase model—potentiation, novelty, refinement, innovation. He applies it to feathers, language, computing, and ecosystems, and discusses how new opportunity spaces and public goods shape what succeeds.

Scott M. Kenworthy, a historian of Eastern Orthodoxy and modern Russia, discusses Patriarch Tikhon Bellavin, a humble parish priest who rose to lead the Russian Church. He traces Tikhon’s institution building in North America, his return to Russia in 1917, clashes with the Bolsheviks, church-state reform efforts, and the trials, arrests, and resilience that shaped the Orthodox Church’s fate.

Priyanka Kumar, a naturalist, filmmaker, and author exploring orchards and human relationships with the wild. She recalls Himalayan orchard childhoods and a wild Santa Fe apple that launched her journey. Topics include lost apple diversity, apples as links between species, orchards as biodiversity havens, and tasting as a pathway back to the wild.

Miriam Udell, a scholar of Yiddish language and Jewish children’s literature at Emory, explores how Yiddish kidlit helped shape modern Jewish life. She discusses how stories imagined aspirational childhoods, the influence of Haskalah, Zionism and socialism, and spaces like the cheder and the “girl out of doors.” Topics include play as resistance, heterotopias, and shifting didactic styles.

Bimbola Akinbola, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and author of Transatlantic Disbelonging, explores Nigerian diasporic women artists. She discusses reframing diaspora from loss to playful self‑definition. Topics include unruliness as return, eroticism and anti‑respectability, speculative worldbuilding, cross‑media collaboration, and homemaking through art.

Ho-fung Hung, a Johns Hopkins professor of political economy and China specialist, discusses how Western views of China swing between idealization and demonization. He explores how political interests, stereotypes, and Chinese state narratives shape those images. The conversation highlights lending myths, co-production of knowledge, self-orientalization, and why plural, deorientalized perspectives matter.