New Books in Popular Culture
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New Books in Popular Culture
Interviews with Scholars of Popular Culture about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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Springsteen’s "Nebraska" as a Political, Sonic, and Personal Document
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we consider Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska as personal and political document. With the release of the N...
Springsteen’s "Nebraska" as a Political, Sonic, and Personal Document
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we consider Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska as personal and political document. With the release of the N...
Rebecca van Laer, "Cat" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Dr. Rebecca van Laer and her partner purchase a home and move in with their senior cats, Toby and Gus. Their loved ones see this as a step toward an i...
Michael Maniates, "The Living-Green Myth" (Polity Press, 2025)
Dr. Michael F. Maniates is a leading scholar in environmental politics and sustainability studies whose work has fundamentally reshaped how researcher...
Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the...
Brian Baker, "The Road" (Akashic Books, 2025)
The Road (Akashic Books, 2025) is an illuminating selection of photographs spanning iconic punk rock guitarist Brian Baker’s many years of global tour...
Disco's Revenge
In the wake of Disco Demolition Night in 1979—a cultural bonfire that seemed to signal the end of disco—something unexpected began to rise from Chicag...
Kubrick’s Worlds: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition
In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley...
Gilles Deleuze, "On Painting" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Charles J. Stivale (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University) and Dan Smith (Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University) join me to di...
Hector Vera, "Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)
Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its...
Harry Cliff, "Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe" (Doubleday, 2024)
Nothing captivates the human imagination like the vast unknowns of space. Ancient petroglyphs present renderings of the heavens, proof that we have be...
Scott D. Anthony, "Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World" (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025)
Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025) arrives at the perfect moment as artificial intell...
What Do You Want Out of Life? A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters
What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money, work for justice, run marathons, sing in a choir, have children, travel the world? The things we...
Greg Soden, "Unscripted Moments: Conversations with Propagandhi (2020-2025)" (Earth Island Books, 2025)
Propagandhi formed in 1986 in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Canada and are now based in Winnipeg. Their outspoken influence and consistency in anti-fa...
Carl Rollyson, "The Making of Sylvia Plath (UP Mississippi, 2024)
Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her se...
Megan Walsh, "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters" (Columbia Global Reports, 2022)
What does contemporary China’s diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics?
The...
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it....
Stevie Suan, "Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its...
Bradley Morgan, "U2: Until the End of the World" (Weldon Owen, 2025)
Bradley Morgan’s U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025) celebrates fifty years of U2 with a career-spanning retrospective featuring more...
Arnar Eggert Thoroddsen, "Icelandic Pop: Then, Today, Tomorrow, Next Week" (Reaktion Books, 2025)
Iceland punches well above its weight in the world of music, producing global icons like Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men, and Laufey, while at t...
The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit
As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. Th...
Maggie Gram, "The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History" (Basic Books, 2025)
Maggie Gram is a writer, cultural historian, and designer. She leads an experience-design team at Google. She has taught at the Maryland Institute Col...
Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh J. Warren eds., "Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), edited by Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh...
Signal Award Re-Release: Lost Women of Disco
We're thrilled to announce that our episode “S2.E2. Lost Women of Disco” has been named a finalist in the Best Indie Podcast category at the 2025 Sign...
Jason Schneider, "That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of Hey Joe' and Popular Music's History of Violence" (Anvil Press, 2025)
This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music. “Hey Joe” was written sometime i...
Lorraine Besser, "The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It" (Balance, 2024)
What is a good life? Traditionally, philosophers have seen it as an equation: The Good Life = Happiness + Meaning. But, if it's really that simple, wh...
Chris Dalla Riva, "Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Popular music history collides with data analytics, charts, and numbers in this insightful and surprising look at the greatest hits and musicians, fad...
Matthias Egeler, "Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld" (Yale UP, 2025)
Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings...
John R. Davis, "Keep Your Ear to the Ground: A History of Punk Fanzines in Washington, DC" (Georgetown UP, 2025)
John R. Davis's Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Georgetown University Press, 2025) is the first history of the fanzines that emerged from Washington, DC'...
Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025)
For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became t...
In The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift Addresses Love, Glamour, and Grit
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we review Taylor Swift’s new album “The Life of a Showgirl.” We consider the album’s themes: love, nostalgia, how...
Audrey Golden, "Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats" (Da Capo Press, 2025)
In Shouting Out Loud: Lives of The Raincoats (Da Capo Press, 2025) Audrey Golden traces the history of the iconic band The Raincoats staring of the fo...
Eric T. Jennings, "Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean" (Yale UP, 2025)
Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywhere. I...
Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Kathleen Casey joins Jana Byars to talk about The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford UP, 2025). Purses and bags ha...
Roddy Bottum, "The Royal We" (Akashic Books, 2025)
The Royal We (Akashic Books, 2025) is a poetic survey of a time set in a magical city that once was and is no more. It is a memoir written by Roddy Bo...
Disco Sucks
On July 12, 1979, Chicago’s Comiskey Park erupted into chaos during what was supposed to be a quirky baseball promotion. Shock radio jock Steve Dahl’s...
Nick Katsiadas and Carl Sell eds., "Tolkien's Medievalism in Ruins: The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
The structural and symbolic purposes of ruins in literary texts have a long history, yet few scholars explore their importance within J. R. R. Tolkien...
Alien: Earth Episode Analysis: Emergence and The Real Monsters
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we conclude our analysis of the FX series Alien: Earth with episode 7, “Emergence” and episode 8, “The Real Monst...
"Swiz" (Akashic Books, 2025)
Swiz (Akashic Books, 2025). Swiz was a Washington DC hardcore punk band that existed from April of 1987 through August of 1990, cutting their teeth an...
Christa Anne Bentley et al, eds., "Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans" (Routledge, 2025)
Only 35 years old, Taylor Swift has already had a long career and is a pop culture icon. Her music and career are reported on by the world’s press, an...