New Books Network

Nellie Chu, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University, studies migrant entrepreneurs in Guangzhou’s fast fashion networks. She traces urban villages, wholesale markets, and the liminal status of migrant bosses. The conversation covers transnational traders, policing and rent extraction, platform-driven digitization, and how precarity shapes aspirations and stalled mobility.

Elisheva Baumgarten, Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University, led a collaborative project reconstructing everyday medieval Ashkenazic life. She discusses the book's four lenses: people, spaces, objects, and rituals. Topics include rivers and inns, pawnbroking, local conflicts, hybrid religious practices, and how ordinary lives reveal broader social integration and rupture in medieval northern Europe.

Marco de Benito, Jean Monnet Chair in European Civil Procedure and editor of Colloquies on European Civil Procedure, explains why he used Socratic-style dialogues to explore the new Model European Rules. He talks about balancing insider and outsider perspectives, the aim of harmonization versus uniformity, and how the book can guide reforms and future research on procedural issues.

Megan Peiser, associate professor of English who studies late 18th–early 19th-century women writers and built the Novels Reviewed Database. She explores how review periodicals shaped literary reputations and reader practices. Short takes on how women writers responded in prefaces, the database that maps reviews, and archival surprises that recover forgotten authors.

Nicholas W. Gentile, independent historian and author of Enemies to Their Country, explores Marblehead, Massachusetts during 1774-75. He recounts a controversial town address to the royal governor and the fierce local backlash. The narrative examines political factions, forced recantations and exile, religious influences, and how a small community struggled to achieve consensus amid rising war.

Stanley Reed, veteran London-based journalist who covers energy and the Middle East, walks through why oil still dominates global power. He spotlights Gulf production, pipelines versus the Strait of Hormuz, LNG and Asian demand. They discuss renewed exploration from Namibia to Venezuela, infrastructure risks from attacks, and whether oil demand might peak amid renewables and nuclear pressures.

Thomas Hegghammer, senior research fellow and scholar of militant Islamist movements, discusses deceptive identity mimicry in conflict. He highlights signaling like time spent versus talk, how online forums change trust cues, and why profile longevity and activity matter. He also explores tradeoffs of lurking versus participation, links between online and offline behavior, and how AI shifts the dynamics.

Sarah James, assistant professor and former K–12 teacher and principal, studies how data and politics shape recognition of policy failure. She traces the book’s origins in education and criminalized truancy. She compares Washington and Texas to show how data choices affect whether failures are visible. She discusses how analysis itself is a political tool and explores reforms and interpretation in policy making.

Sarah Howe, British poet and editor known for exploring family, migration, and memory, discusses her new collection Foretokens. She talks about her mother’s hoarding and how family archives shape identity. Conversations trace cultural trauma, the ethics of writing others’ pain, the craft of assembling a poetic archive, and the intuition that knits fragments into a coherent book.

Robert Whiting, author and longtime Japan observer, shares colorful tales of Tokyo outsiders from the 60s and 70s. Stories include a boisterous Australian hostess famed for cutting patrons’ ties, a tattooed female yakuza with a revolver, North Korean drug-smuggling and meth’s rise, and how MK Taxi transformed rude cabs into polished service.