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New Books in Film
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Film
Christopher Hanscom, "Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film" (Columbia UP, 2024)
How does art engage with its social context? What does 'the politics of art' even mean? In his new book Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in…
- New Books in Film
From Hal to Siri: How Computers Learned to Speak
Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program…
- New Books in Film
The Politics of Andor (Season 2, Episodes 10-12): Freedom and Order
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with the conclusion to the series. We break down, analyze, and explain the political…
- New Books in Film
Mayukh Sen, "Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star" (Norton, 2025)
In 2022, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. But she wasn’t the first actress of Asian origin to be…
- New Books in Film
The Politics of Andor (Season 2 Episodes 7-9): Truth and Discipline
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 7-9. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the…
- New Books in Film
Vincent L Stephens, "Broads, Sisters, Exes: Feminist Millennial Television" (Wayne State UP, 2025)
This timely and telling analysis identifies the formal and thematic innovations pioneered by millennial feminists between 2012 and 2020 that have shaped the…
- New Books in Film
The Fisher King
It’s our 300th episode and we honor a listener request for this milestone. The Fisher King (1991) could not be made today–not because of politics or cultural…
- New Books in Film
Mike Miley, "David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
How are David Lynch's films as much in dialogue with literary and musical traditions as they are cinematic ones? By interrogating this question, David Lynch’s…
- New Books in Film
Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, "Watching TV: American Television Season by Season, Fourth Edition" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
In their fourth edition of Watching TV: American Television Season by Season (Syracuse University Press, 2025), Harry Castleman and Walter Podrazik present a…
- New Books in Film
Tupur Chatterjee, "Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India" (NYU Press, 2025)
Since the late 1990s, the multiplex in India has emerged as a dominant site of media exhibition, almost always embedded within the shopping mall. This spatial…
- New Books in Film
The Politics of Andor (Season 2 Episodes 4-6): Too Much Information
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 4-6. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the…
- New Books in Film
Ipek A. Celik Rappas, "Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the effort behind creating screen production locations. Dr. Ipek A…
- New Books in Film
Amanda D. Lotz, "After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-First Century" (NYU Press, 2025)
With significant evolutions in digital technologies and media distribution in the past two decades, the business of storytelling through screens has shifted…
- New Books in Film
Peeping Tom
“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” So said W. H. Auden and so we…
- New Books in Film
The Politics of Andor (Season 2 Episodes 1-3): The Personal is Political
It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we react to Andor Season 2, episodes 1-3. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the motives and aims of…
- New Books in Film
Ben Arogundade, "Hollywood Blackout: The Battle for Recognition in a White Hollywood" (Cassell, 2025)
On February 29, 1940, African American actor Hattie McDaniel became the first person of color, and the first Black woman, to win an Academy Award. The moment…
- New Books in Film
Ross Benes, "1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
In 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted our Bizarre Times (2025, University of Kansas Press) journalist Ross Benes examines low culture…
- New Books in Film
Peter B. Kaufman, "The Moving Image: A User's Manual" (MIT Press, 2025)
Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans…
- New Books in Film
Giorgio Bertellini, "The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America" (U California Press, 2019)
In 1927, the Hollywood stars (and spouses), Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr stood outside their California home, arms raised in fascist salute. The…
- New Books in Film
Jonathan D. Cohen, "Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)
In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so…
- New Books in Film
Alfred L. Martin, Jr., "Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences" (NYU Press, 2025)
Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our…
- New Books in Film
Jaye Early, "Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private Experiences in Public Spaces" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity Private Experiences in Public Spaces (Bloomsbury, 2025) examines the development of the confessional subject in video…
- New Books in Film
Megan Hunt, "Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil Rights in Hollywood's American South" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Megan Hunt joins us to talk about her recent book, Southern By the Grace of God, which was published in 2024 by…
- New Books in Film
Bridget Kies, "Murder, She Wrote" (Wayne State UP, 2025)
As part of the TV Milestones Series, Bridget Kies explores Murder, She Wrote (Wayne State University Press, 2025). Embark on a journey through the mysteries of…
- New Books in Film
The Free Speech and Poetry of Ana Blandiana
In this episode, we sit down with Director and Producer Diana Nicolae and Editor and Camera Matt Jozwiakowski to discuss their documentary film, "Between…
- New Books in Film
Paul R. Laird and Elizabeth A. Wells, "The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of…
- New Books in Film
Adam Kotsko, "Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by Dr. Adam Kotsko explores the beloved science fiction…
- New Books in Film
Woman in the Dunes
In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau said he wanted to “drive life into a corner” and “reduce it to its lowest terms.” We often feel the appeal of that idea…
- New Books in Film
Fiona Handyside, "Girls' Hairstories: Sparkle and Resilience in Contemporary Screen Cultures" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen’s Power Plait to JoJo Siwa’s outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is…
- New Books in Film
Hye Seung Chung, "Cinema Under National Reconstruction: State Censorship and South Korea's Cold War Film Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
Cinema under National Reconstruction (Rutgers UP, 2024) calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military…
- New Books in Film
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Every Western since Stagecoach seems to have been touted as “about the western.” To what degree is that true for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, George Roy…
- New Books in Film
Eric Dienstfrey, "Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology" (U California Press, 2024)
Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit: The…
- New Books in Film
Nadira Khatun, "Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception (Oxford UP, 2024), Nadira Khatun explores the contentious Muslim…
- New Books in Film
Chris Alexander, "Art! Trash! Terror! Adventures in Strange Cinema" (Headpress, 2025)
ART! TRASH! TERROR! Adventures in Strange Cinema (Headpress 2025) by Chris Alexander is a treasure trove of in-depth essays and edifying interviews that…
- New Books in Film
Alfie Bown, "Post-Comedy" (Polity, 2025)
Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting…
- New Books in Film
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, "Bong Joon Ho" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho's enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. In Bong Joon Ho (U…
- New Books in Film
Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola, "Hollywood Unions" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
Hollywood Unions (Rutgers UP, 2024) is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and television…
- New Books in Film
Waiyee Loh, "Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian Narratives in the Global Creative Economy" (SUNY Press, 2024)
Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian Narratives in the Global Creative Economy (SUNY Press, 2024) by Dr. Waiyee Loh brings together contemporary representations of…
- New Books in Film
Esha Niyogi De, "Women's Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the…
- New Books in Film
Florence Martin, "Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) unfolds and analyzes the work of Moroccan director, producer, and scriptwriter Farida…
- New Books in Film
William Burns, "Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia" (Headpress, 2025)
The future ain't what it used to be. Is nostalgia revitalizing or killing 21st-century culture? The concept of nostalgia has seeped into almost all aspects of…
- New Books in Film
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
When George V. Higgins’s first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, was published in 1970, it was widely acclaimed as an insider’s look at Boston’s criminal…
- New Books in Film
In “The Beast,” AI Puts Limits on Human Emotion
It’s the UConn Popcast, and “The Beast” is a 2023 sci fi / romance movie by French director Bertrand Bonello, in which artificial intelligence has determined…
New Books in FilmFailed Passing
Ian Fleishman develops the concept of failed passing in his new book Flamboyant Fictions, which reimagines free will in queer lives as an accidental…
- New Books in Film
American Made
Imagine you’re in a bar, holding forth about the news of the day–maybe it’s 1985 and, like everyone else, you’re talking about Iran-Contra, Oliver North, and…
- New Books in Film
Parisa Vaziri, "Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding…
- New Books in Film
Martin D. Brown et al., "The Bondian Cold War: The Transnational Legacy of a Cultural Icon" (Routledge, 2024)
James Bond, Ian Fleming’s irrepressible and ubiquitous ‘spy,’ is often understood as a Cold Warrior, but James Bond’s Cold War diverged from the actual global…
- New Books in Film
Seung-hoon Jeong, "Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema" (Oxford UP, 2023)
If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, Seung-hoon Jeong’s global frame highlights two conflicting…
- New Books in Film
Davide Panagia, "Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France" (Fordham UP, 2024)
Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental…
- New Books in Film
Neil Fox, "Music Films: Documentaries, Concert Films and Other Cinematic Representations of Popular Music" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
In Music Films: Documentaries, Concert Films and Other Cinematic Representations of Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2024), Dr. Neil Fox considers a broad range of…
- New Books in Film
James Fenwick, "Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive" (Liverpool UP, 2024)
What can archives tell us about the film industry? In Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive (Liverpool UP, 2024), James Fenwick, a…
- New Books in Film
A.I. is Spielberg & Kubrick’s Dark Twisted Fantasy
It’s the UConn Popcast, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, is a strange and profound text on human-AI relations. Centering on…
- New Books in Film
The Rainmaker
All of the nearly three hundred episodes we’ve done so far have been enthusiastic celebrations of artists whose work we admire so greatly that we had to invent…
- New Books in Film
What Ex Machina Tell Us About Human-AI Psychology
It’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI…
- New Books in Film
Marina Hassapopoulou, "Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) engages with a multitude of unconventional approaches…
- New Books in Film
Oishik Sircar, "Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and…
- New Books in Film
Vincent Haddad, "The Detroit Genre: Race, Dispossession, and Resilience in American Literature and Film, 1967-2023" (Lever Press, 2024)
Detroit has an essential relationship to genre in American literature and popular culture. The contemporary formations of the suburban sitcom, the…
- New Books in Film
The Big Heat
Just as horror films are filled with characters who never seem quite enough afraid, crime films are filled with protagonists who, at the end of the movie…
- New Books in Film
Jeremy Dauber, "American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond" (Algonquin Books, 2024)
From the acclaimed author of American Comics comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American…
- New Books in Film
Scott Huver, "Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210" (Post Hill Press, 2024)
Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210 (Post Hill Press, 2024) explores the city’s true crime history, delving deep inside cases that made…