New Books with Miranda Melcher

Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024
(Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Xian Aubin Wang investigates
decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of
China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the
village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that
resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining the causes and legacies of
the Shadian
massacre, Dr. Wang draws on an extensive review of internal official
documents, original written testimonies, and firsthand interviews with
Muslim villagers.

By exploring interactions among Beijing, the Yunnan provincial government, county officials, CCP Muslim cadres, and Shadian
villagers against the backdrop of the CCP's nationwide political
campaigns since the early 1950s, Dr. Wang shows how Islam and Maoism
influenced the ways that local villagers and party cadres saw and dealt
with each other—and how these encounters shaped the developing conflict
and its aftermath. Providing an in-depth account of Chinese religious
groups living under the CCP, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan
reveals how religion and politics shaped Muslim villagers' responses to
the party-state's efforts to control and secularize them.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The
sense of smell is often linked to the dark, the antisocial, the
primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. Today we live
in an almost odorless world, where everything is reduced to images. Yet
smell plays a vital role in how we relate to others and our
surroundings, forming our experiences and our memories. Tracing a
history of smell from the first ancient cities, through medieval plagues
and the Industrial Revolution to the present day, Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense (Reaktion,
2026) is a tribute to the sense of smell in all its beauty and disgust.
Along the way, Bjørn Berge introduces us to twenty iconic scents—from
blood and soil to the ocean—and invites readers to reflect on and
reawaken their senses.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, was the first feminist exploration of the link between sex and male power. It sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionised the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?

In The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report (Melville House and New South, 2026), Australian historian Dr. Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex – namely, that sex is sexist – the book explores Hite’s fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Dr. Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality.

In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Dr. Rosa Campbell’s examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London (Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Peter Ross, step into the kitchens, streets
and chop houses of Georgian London—one day, one city, countless
appetites. From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns,
coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate
houses, soup shops
and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bustled with vendors
offering early versions of fast food: hot green peas, baked potatoes,
suet puddings, curds and whey, rice milk, gingerbread, pastry ‘pigs,’
and the now-forgotten saloop, a warming drink made from orchid roots. 

After
dark, sex workers and their clients indulged in a glass of jelly, then
considered an aphrodisiac, as a precursor to a visit to the brothel. As
the empire expanded, culinary influences poured in: London’s first
Indian takeaway appeared in 1773, while the East End became home to
Jewish fried fish, Italian baloney and German sausages.

Through
the course of a single day, this book takes readers on a journey through
breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper in Georgian London, drawing on
contemporary archives to follow hungry citizens from all walks of life
as they navigate the city’s diverse food landscape. It reveals not only
culinary pleasures and horrors, but also the social challenges and
daily struggles that shaped life in the capital.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire: Family, Law and War (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Kate Dannies examines the gender and family dimensions of mobilisation for the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, situating the war in a long-nineteenth-century social history of Ottoman military reform for the first time. It focuses on the military legal concept of muinsizlik (sole breadwinning) and how this concept shaped Ottoman military policy – namely, how militarisation and mobilisation were supported by the exploitation of women’s care and social reproductive labour, as well as the extraction of material and physical resources from Ottoman families.

In exploring how war worked at the level of the body, the individual and the family, this book demonstrates how Ottoman society and war became imbricated through processes of militarisation that led to significant consequences during the First World War and its aftermath. Based on a gendered reading of Ottoman military and bureaucratic archives, it addresses a pivotal moment in the modern history of the Middle East that has long awaited further study from a bottom-up perspective.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices