New Books Network

Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra, Sri Lankan-born curator and author, draws on decades of cultural programming to explore early photographs and collections from colonial Ceylon. She traces how images were made, moved, and viewed across UK and local archives. The conversation highlights overlooked Sri Lankan photography, humanizing colonial lenses, and surprising links between royal, family, and institutional collections.

James McDougall, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford, offers a sweeping global history of Islam from Late Antiquity to the digital age. He traces long arcs of expansion, local diversity, and modern transformations. The conversation highlights biographical storytelling, research methods, and how global scholarship reshapes understanding of Islam’s past and present.

Rachel Rojanski, Brown professor and author of Yiddish in Israel: A History. Sunny Yudkoff, Yiddish literature scholar who rethinks suppression narratives. Shachar Pinsker, scholar linking Yiddish and Hebrew literary worlds. Rachel Brenner, literary scholar on language shift. They debate state influence, Yiddish press and theater, mediating literary figures, and changing attitudes toward Yiddish in Israel.

A lively debate pits two Michael Mann favorites against each other in a tournament-style matchup. Conversation centers on Mann’s shift from mechanical precision to romantic naturalism. They dissect major adaptation choices, altered character dynamics, and how edits affect mythic power. The hosts also weigh visual style, pacing, soundtrack, and the challenges of dramatizing a legendary boxer.

John Kuhn, an associate professor of English who studies early modern drama, discusses theatrical portrayals of pagan ritual in seventeenth-century England. He traces recurring stage set pieces like oracles, triumphs, and conjurations across playwrights. The conversation follows how those theatrical tropes moved into colonial contexts and shaped the emerging category of paganism.

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.

Matt Hooley, Dartmouth scholar of Indigenous literature, and Billy-Ray Belcourt, Cree poet, novelist, and essayist, discuss A Minor Chorus and the move from poetry to an experimental novel. They explore using a singular voice to carry communal desires, Indigenous forms and pseudo-oral history, queer mothering, grief and melancholia, and how romantic intimacy and craft shape beautiful sentences.

Erica Morawski, an associate professor at Pratt Institute who studies architecture and design in the Hispanic Caribbean, discusses hotel design as a lens on development and national identity. She examines imperial projects, state modernization plans, economic incentives, and how material choices and aesthetics shaped tourism in San Juan, Ciudad Trujillo, and Havana.

Cathryn J. Prince, author and Fordham journalism adjunct, profiles labor leader Pauline Newman. Conversation traces Newman’s immigrant sweatshop childhood, pioneering union organizing, the impact of the Triangle fire, her long relationship with Frida Miller, and decades of work on worker health, safety, and postwar labor rebuilding. Short, vivid stories reveal the people and struggles behind major labor reforms.

Dr. Melissa Burch, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and director of the Afterlives of Conviction Project, studies how criminal records shape work and exclusion. She traces the history of routine background checks, describes fieldwork with job-seekers and employers in Southern California, and explores how institutions, risk narratives, and logistics sustain barriers to employment.