New Books Network

Lisa Siraganian, a humanities scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins, explores how legal fictions reshape who counts as a person. She traces corporate personhood’s influence on rights for trees, fetuses, and robots. Short conversations probe environmental personhood, AI citizenship stunts, and alternatives that stress duties and political solidarity.

Daphne A. Brooks, Yale scholar and co-director of the Yale Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, discusses her edited collection on the legacies of David Bowie and Prince. She traces how grief sparked the project. She explores their ties across race, gender, place, experimental sound, performance, and the book’s hybrid forms like interviews and curatorial pieces.

Rory Naismith, medieval historian and Cambridge professor, offers a fresh biography of Offa of Mercia. He discusses limited sources and how charters and coins reveal Offa’s image-making. Topics include Mercian power, coinage reform, the political meaning of Offa’s Dyke, diplomacy with Charlemagne and the papacy, and Offa’s lasting influence on kingship.

Jason Reynolds, award-winning author and storyteller known for powerful work for young readers. He talks about Soundtrack’s journey from audio-first to print. He explores musical influences, composing prose to a rhythm and metronome. He describes busking, New York’s street music culture, and how drumming and rhythm shape character and identity.

Dr. Ingrid Parvold Kvangraven, economist who studies decolonizing economic thought and racial capitalism, joins to unpack the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline. She highlights how claims of neutrality, modeling practices, and development frameworks obscure structural power, race, and colonial violence. The conversation explores why mainstream methods misdiagnose inequality and how alternative traditions can broaden public debates.

David-James Gonzales, an assistant professor and historian of Latina/o/x politics, explores how Mexican American communities in Orange County built grassroots movements to challenge segregation. He traces citrus capitalists' role in creating barrios, the rise of local mutual-aid groups and legal mobilization culminating in Mendez v. Westminster, and the long-term political legacy of those organizers.

Keisha N. Blain, historian of Black women's activism; Manisha Sinha, scholar of Reconstruction and civil rights law; Tyina L. Steptoe, editor of the Library of America Jim Crow volumes and R&B historian. They read powerful firsthand accounts. They trace lynching, legal fights like Plessy, mass migration, Tulsa's destruction, transit battles, and the long arc from Jim Crow toward the civil rights era.

Nabil Ali, a research artist at Cambridge University Botanic Garden who recreates historical recipes for natural inks, paints, and dyes. He talks about seasonal harvesting and medieval workshop practices. He explains practical frameworks for making pigments and demonstrates surprising results like golden ink from Newton’s apple tree and vivid greens and blues from iris.

Paul Robichaud, Professor of English and author probing folklore and prehistoric monuments. He traces medieval tales, Renaissance antiquarianism, Romantic reinventions, and recurring folklore motifs around Stonehenge, Newgrange and lesser-known sites. Conversations wander from druids and petrified dancers to folk-horror and why storytelling endures despite archaeology.

A discussion about how science fiction reimagines the early colonial archive and the idea of novelty tied to conquest. They explore narrative strategies like time travel, inversions, and indigenous mapping that rewrite contact stories. Conversations trace how sixteenth century writing, bureaucracy, and mining shaped colonial modernity and how speculative rewritings open anti-colonial imaginaries.