Shows / New Books in Popular Culture
New Books in Popular Culture
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 Popular Culture
Shelly Jones and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, "Beyond the Deck: Critical Essays on Magic, The Gathering and Its Influence" (McFarland, 2023)
Since its debut in 1993, Magic: The Gathering has grown to be an influential collectible card game, allowing its community of loyal fans to duel each other…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Briony Hannell, "Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
What is the connection between fan culture and feminism? In Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury, 2023), Briony Hannell, a lecturer in…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Jaqueline Berndt, "The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
In recent years, manga and anime have attracted increasing scholarly interest beyond the realm of Japanese studies. This Companion takes a unique approach…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Jeff Copeland, "Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn" (Feral House, 2025)
In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Katie Beisel Hollenbach, "The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Peter J. Bowler, "Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Jeff Gomez, "There Was No Alternative: Generation X, AIDS, and the Making of a Classic Nineties Record" (McFarland, 2023)
Grunge. Flannel. Generation X. In 1993, Seattle was the capital of the world, Nirvana was king, and slackers were everywhere. When the Red Hot organization, a…
- New Books in Popular Culture
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 Popular Culture
Stan Bunger, "Mornings with Madden: My Radio Life With An American Legend" (Triumph, 2024)
John Madden is synonymous with football. He was the television face and voice of the nation's most popular sport, the namesake of its best-selling sports video…
- New Books in Popular Culture
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 Popular Culture
Marijam Did, "Everything to Play For: An Insider's Guide to How Videogames are Changing Our World" (Verso, 2024)
Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World (Verso, 2024) by Marijiam Did asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead of…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Robert Dayton, "Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam" (Feral House, 2024)
Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam (Feral House, 2025) uncovers a forgotten yet fascinating chapter on glam rock music and culture...from Canada…
- New Books in Popular Culture
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 Popular Culture
Catherine Butler, "British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children's books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Marco Arnaudo, "The Tabletop Revolution: Gaming Reimagined in the 21st Century" (McFarland, 2023)
The Tabletop Revolution: Gaming Reimagined in the 21st Century (McFarland, 2023) is an overview of the ongoing revolution in tabletop gaming design and…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Lily E. Hirsch, "Taking Funny Music Seriously" (Indiana UP, 2024)
Take funny music seriously! Though often dismissed as silly or derivative, funny music, Lily E. Hirsch argues, is incredibly creative and dynamic, serving…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Javaria Farooqui, "Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, "Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
In Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2024), Beretta E. Smith-Shomade contends that Black…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Jesper Juul, "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" (MIT Press, 2024)
The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be fun. The…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Andrew S. Latham, "Hey! Listen!: Hypertext Rhetoric and The Legend of Zelda" (McFarland, 2024)
How does analyzing video games as hypertexts expand the landscape of research for video game rhetoricians and games studies scholars? This is the first book to…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Sujatha Fernandes, "Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life" (Duke, UP 2020)
Cuban resourcefulness is on full display in Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke 2020), as sociologist Sujatha Fernandes presents an array of…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Nick Yablon, "Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Nick Yablon traces the birth of the time capsule in…
- New Books in Popular Culture
James Welker, "Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines three dynamic and…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Johny Brown, "Corpse Flower" (Skill, 2024)
From the frontman of Band of Holy Joy, Johny Brown, Corpse Flower (Skill, 2024), is a long-form prose poem that shares Brown's journey through one of the most…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)
In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson reveals in…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Christine M. Larson, "Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success" (Princeton UP, 2024)
As writers, musicians, online content creators, and other independent workers fight for better labor terms, romance authors offer a powerful example—and a…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Randy Fertel, "Winging It: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of AI & Trump" (Spring, 2024)
Winging It: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of AI & Trump (Spring, 2024) is Randy Fertel’s third book, his second on improvisation. Creating something…
- New Books in Popular Culture
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 Popular Culture
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 Popular Culture
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…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Julien Mailland, "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry" (MIT Press, 2024)
A guide to the fascinating legal history of the videogame industry, written for nonlawyers. Why did a judge recall FIFA 15, a nonviolent soccer game, from…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Matthew S. Smith, "EverQuest" (Boss Fight Books, 2024)
“You’re in our world now.” This bold tagline led Sony’s 1999 ad blitz for EverQuest (Boss Fight Books, 2024), the year’s most anticipated massively multiplayer…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman, "Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie®" (MIT Press, 2024)
The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless…
- New Books in Popular Culture
A. L. McClanan, "Griffinology: The Griffin's Place in Myth, History and Art" (Reaktion, 2024)
A. L. McClanan's Griffinology: The Griffin's Place in Myth, History and Art (Reaktion, 2024) is a fascinating exploration of the mythical creature's many…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Barbara A. Biesecker, "Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State" (Penn State Press, 2024)
By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Leah Kardos, "Kate Bush's Hounds of Love" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Hounds Of Love invites you to not only listen, but to cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility. Side A spawned…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Victoria Sturtevant, "It's All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy" (U Texas Press, 2024)
Victoria Sturtevant's It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2024) is about how changing…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Toby Bennett, "Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
How does the music industry actually work? In Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out Toby Bennett, a…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Joy White, "Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture During Covid" (Repeater, 2024)
What happened to culture in 2020? In Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture During Covid (Repeater, 2024), Joy White, a Lecturer in Applied Social…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Sam Langsdale, "Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics" (U Texas Press, 2024)
It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Seth Rogovoy, "Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Seth Rogovoy's latest book for Oxford University Press is called Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2024). Often…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Nick Butler, "The Trouble with Jokes: Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics" (Policy Press, 2023)
In this podcast, Nick Butler explores humour's complex and often controversial role in shaping modern political discourse, examining how jokes can challenge…
- New Books in Popular Culture
David Suisman, "Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America's Soldiers" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
In his new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of the America's Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David Suisman shows that the US…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Veronica Keller and Sabrina Mittermeier, "From Broadway to the Bronx: New York City’s History through Song" (Intellect, 2024)
From Broadway to the Bronx: New York City’s History through Song (Intellect, 2024) tells the history of New York City in song across a variety of different…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Travis A. Weisse, "Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness" (UNC Press, 2024)
In Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) Dr. Travis A. Weisse tells a new…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Mimi Okabe, "Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultural…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Peter Singer, "Consider the Turkey" (Princeton UP, 2024)
A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today’s specially bred, commercially…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Shalini Kakar, "Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)
Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) examines how fans worship…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Vivian Asimos, "Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity" (Reaktion, 2024)
Cosplay, born from the fusion of ‘costume’ and ‘play’, transcends mere dress-up by transforming enthusiasts of TV shows, movies, books or video games into…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Benjamin Barson, "Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons" (Wesleyan UP, 2024)
Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan UP, 2024) recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Anthony Kwame Harrison on Cassette Tapes and Hip Hop Culture
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Kwame Harrison, Alumni Distinguished Professor and Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Harrison records and…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Connie DeNave, "The Image Maker: Shattering Rock and Roll's Glass" (2023)
In The Image Maker: Shattering Rock and Roll's Glass Ceiling (2023), Connie DeNave shares her experiences in the public relations world during the British…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Karen M. Dunak, "Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life" (NYU Press, 2024)
When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became First Lady of the United States over sixty years ago, she stepped into the public spotlight. Although Jackie is perhaps…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Erin Lee Mock, "Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II" (U Virginia Press, 2024)
Millions of GIs returned from overseas in 1945. A generation of men who had left their families and had learned to kill and to quickly dispatch sexual urges…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Elsie Walker, "Life 24x a Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Life 24x a Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society (Oxford UP, 2023) highlights the life-sustaining and life-affirming power of cinema. Author Elsie Walker pays…
- New Books in Popular Culture
David Shoemaker, "Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
What good is a good sense of humour especially when the humour may be ethically questionable? Although humour seems a valuable part of a good conversation and…
- New Books in Popular Culture
Hunter Hargraves, "Uncomfortable Television" (Duke UP, 2024)
From The Wire to Intervention to Girls, postmillennial American television has dazzled audiences with novelistic seriality and cinematic aesthetics. Yet this…