New Books Network

Eleanor Houghton, Brontë scholar, dress historian and illustrator, explores Charlotte Brontë through the 150 surviving garments she owned. She describes discovering the wardrobe, using drawing and scientific tests to date and analyze dresses, and how clothes illuminate sewing skill, literary scenes, provenance puzzles and the garments’ afterlives.

Karen Pastorello, historian of labor and women’s history and former Women and Gender Studies chair. Susan Goodier, historian of women’s history and suffrage and former New York History Journal board member. They trace suffrage origins in abolitionism and legal inequality. They map evolving tactics from petitions and parades to canvassing and early marketing. They highlight diverse supporters across class, race, and region.

Daniel Rachel, award-winning music historian and former musician, probes seven decades of rock’s flirtations with Nazi imagery. He traces instances from early rock theatrics to punk’s provocation and modern social-media amplification. The conversation navigates memory, accountability, and how popular music has repeatedly toyed with dangerous symbolism.

Wout Saelens, early modern historian and author of Fossil Consumerism, traces how household choices in the Low Countries drove early fossil fuel use. He discusses shifts in stoves and heating, changing domestic routines and gendered labor, regional fuel differences, and how warmth became a cultural ideal amid rising indoor pollution.

Eivind Røssaak, research professor in visual media and author of The Cory Arcangel Hack, maps how Arcangel’s DIY hacks reorder digital culture. He traces hacker-art collisions, presents a taxonomy of flow-break, flow-remix, and flow-parody hacks, and situates Arcangel within contemporary digital art. The conversation also looks ahead to AI ecologies and how media technologies shape expressive flows.

Philip B. Uninsky, an academic social scientist, attorney, and nonprofit director, recounts his extended Jewish family’s survival across pogroms, revolution, and the Holocaust. He explores memory’s slipperiness and creative nonfiction methods. Short portraits reveal diverse, surprising forms of resilience. Conversations probe secrecy, reinvention, and why some stayed while others left.

Guy Pinsent, a British ex‑real estate entrepreneur, former banker and diplomat, founded Less Mess Storage in Poland and the Czech Republic. He describes building a large self‑storage platform, why freehold property and counter‑cyclical demand make the model attractive, and how acquisitions, marketing in low‑awareness markets, and tough CEO decisions shaped growth.

Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, historian and author specializing in Civil War medical history and Vicksburg, discusses how medical organization shaped the 200-mile campaign and siege. She highlights reforms in army medicine, the toll of disease and sanitation, tensions between surgeons and commanders, and surprising research finds about burials and caregiver experiences.

Nancy Hudgins, a former lawyer turned children’s book writer and editor, explores the life of Ursula Nordstrom. She connects childhood reading, archival research, and the switch from picture-book attempts to a middle-grade biography. Conversations touch on editorial mentorship, the shifting landscape of children’s publishing, and new projects about librarians.

Christine Grandy, Associate Professor in History at the University of Lincoln, studies race, media, and British cultural history. She traces how twentieth-century TV recycled imperial films, how audience research exposed everyday anti-immigrant views, and why programmes from Rainbow City to Desmond's provoked backlash and resistance. Discussion also covers the role of the Black press and changing viewer pleasures with US imports.