Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press 2019) by Andrea Kitta, Associate Professor in the English department at East Carolina University, examines the discourses and metaphors of contagion and contamination in ve…

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II an…

Ziggy Hanaor is the director of Cicada Books, a boutique children’s publishing company. She has also written nine books including Fly Flies, Alex and Alex and The Pocket Chaotic, which have won awards and have been translated into over 20 languages. In our conversation we celebrate her new book about the history of the universe and us, entitled, Li…

Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt. For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internatio…

In her new book Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester UP, 2021), Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo explains how the modernization of this great city shaped and was shaped by print media and mass culture. A growing population, industrial immigration, mass connection with the wider world (making it both sm…

In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experience…

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action 'for the environment' is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city. Based on the a…

In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry. Our country’s leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more pe…

Today’s guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University’s English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She …

The protection and restoration of cultural heritage is essential, especially in conflict and post-conflict zones. Armed conflicts frequently result in the destruction or collateral damage of cultural landmarks, artifacts, and traditions. In post-conflict recovery, preserving cultural heritage is not only a matter of historical conservation but help…

How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge takes up these questions through detailed analyses of practices that generate atmospheres and in which knowledge emerges through visceral intermingling…

Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book…

In this episode, Chella Ward and Claudia Radiven were in conversation with Zumretay Arkin, discussing the Uyghur genocide in East Turkestan. Zumretay is Chair of the Women’s Committee at the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). The WUC is an international organization acting as an umbrella organization representing and advocating for Uyghurs around the wor…

What is space? What is time? Where did the universe come from? The answers to mankind's most enduring questions may lie in science's greatest enigma: black holes. A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. This can occur when a star approaches the end of its life. Unable to generate enough…

Naomi Bakes joins Jana Byars to talk about Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century (Reaktion Books, 2025), a book that explores the stories of early modern Protestant women, including Rose Thurgood, Anna Trapnel, and Jane Lead, who defied the religious authority of their age. Voices of Thunder illuminates the stories a…

We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses. Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between this self-image …

David Beito's new book brings to bear the latest historical scholarship to shed light on the life and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Professor Beito traces the irresistible political rise of Roosevelt, a scion of inherited wealth who never posed as a man of the people but was always perceived as a genial aristocrat. As well as eyebrow-r…

This episode features Dr. J. Stephen Yuille, Professor of Church History and Spiritual Formation at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Director of Puritan Publishing at Reformation Heritage Books. Yuille shares with the NBN about his new five-volume edition of The Works of John Cotton (Soli Deo Gloria, 2025). John Cotton (1585–1652) was …

Every year, NBN speaks with the president of AUPresses in anticipation of University Press Week. This year, press week will take place from November 10 through the 14th, with the theme: #TeamUP. To celebrate, I’m thrilled to have Dennis Lloyd, director of the University of Wisconsin Press, and president of the Association of University Presses, on …

Into the Leopard’s Den (Pegasus / Hachette India: 2025), the latest novel in the Bangalore Detective Club series by Harini Nagendra, opens with a home invasion gone wrong: An elderly woman in 1920s India, murdered by a mystery assailant during a robbery. Kaveri Murthy, amateur detective, takes on the case–and soon uncovers a whole array of other my…

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny speaks with Alex Priou, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin, about how technology and ideology shape the modern soul. From Machiavelli’s “dikes and dams” to Odysseus’s struggle against the Sirens, Priou traces how modernity’s drive for control has l…

In our engaging interview, we celebrate award-wining illustrator Julien Chung's new book, You Can't Tame a Tiger (OwlKids) written by Stephanie Ellen Sy, published September, 2025, and talk about his many-faceted career, his ability to mix the commercial and the artistic, his love for surprises and 'wow' moments, and his transition from graphic des…

Our Primary Expertise argues counter to the longstanding trend in the field by seeing religion as mundane and not unique, which means that the field's research and teaching can have relevance all across human culture, and well beyond academia. Russell McCutcheon offers a timely argument by taking seriously threats to the humanities now happening al…

In Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule (U Washington Press, 2024), female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in T…

Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea …

Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles the profound history of a low-income county that became a pivotal site for Delta organizing during the civil rights movement. Landowning African American farmers, who enjoyed more economic independenc…