New Books with Miranda Melcher

Understanding the world of art—particularly antiquities and archaeological artifacts—requires tracing how objects are removed from the ground, displaced by conflict or economic hardship, and ultimately reappear in the international art market. The odyssey of an artifact from its excavation site to an auction house, a private collection, or a museum display case raises a host of pressing concerns about the fragility of cultural heritage but also the global mechanisms that sustain its circulation. In recent years, growing awareness of a possible link between the illegal antiquities trade and terrorist financing has brought new scrutiny to regions marked by war and instability, particularly in the Middle East. In such places, archaeological sites are especially vulnerable to looting and illicit excavation, with the profits from these "blood antiquities" sometimes flowing back to fund further violence.
Art for War: Heritage Looting, Blood Antiquities, and the International Fight Against Terrorism Financing (Stanford UP, 2026) by Dr. Costanza Musu examines how this transformation in perception—from an archaeological concern to a matter of international security—reshaped the global response to antiquities trafficking. Viewing the trade through a security lens, the book offers scholars, policymakers, and students of international affairs a new way to understand how the protection of cultural heritage became entangled with the politics of counterterrorism and global security, sparking new debates over art, heritage, and security.
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.

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When American churches face financial difficulties, a disproportionately high number of Black churches reorganize under chapter 11 bankruptcy. There are no easy explanations for this distinction: not location, denomination, leadership structure, or the reasons for the loans. In Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive (U Chicago Press, 2026), legal scholar Pamela Foohey asks why, then, Black churches account for two-thirds of all congregations that file for chapter 11 bankruptcy every year.
Drawing on case studies of six Black churches and one white church, and 150 interviews with church leaders, members, and attorneys, Foohey finds answers in a long history of predatory lending. Unable to negotiate with recalcitrant loan officers, Black churches turn to the legal system to force reasonable concessions from lenders to prevent the stripping of their wealth and the destruction of their communities. While the structural discrimination remains, these churches have found in the bankruptcy system a refuge and some power to fight back.
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.

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Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down sex discrimination, Dorothy Kenyon drew the legal blueprint. Justice Was Her Calling: The Fierce and Fascinating Life of Dorothy Kenyon (U California Press, 2026) by Jennifer Brinkley is the first full-length biography of the New York judge, lawyer, and civil liberties champion whose litigation strategies helped transform the Equal Protection Clause into a powerful tool for women’s rights. Across decades, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal and into the rise of second-wave feminism, Dorothy Kenyon stood at the forefront of reform.
A longtime ACLU national board member, the only woman appointed by the League of Nations to study women’s legal status worldwide, and a US delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Kenyon pushed equality onto the global stage long before it was widely embraced. Her career was nearly undone when Senator Joseph McCarthy named her first on his list of alleged communists, a spurious accusation that cast a lasting shadow.
Drawing on letters, speeches, and fresh archival research, Brinkley restores Kenyon to her rightful status as a legal pioneer and reminds us that civil liberties endure only when defended.
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.

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Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from us, politically and otherwise—is far from obvious. Does it mean that we are all the same, and so the same standards should apply indifferently to everyone? Or does it mean that we are all different in ways similarly deserving of respect? These questions, and many more, reflect the profound ambiguities and contradictions that have riddled the history of the idea of equality.
First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism (Harvard UP, 2026) by Professor Teresa Bejan examines a radical turning point in that history. Since antiquity, influential legal and philosophical traditions have held that all humans are fundamentally equal. Yet these claims proved surprisingly at home in a world defined by social hierarchy, political exclusion, and enslavement. In seventeenth-century England, the meaning—and practical circumstances—of equality began to change. Political philosopher Dr. Bejan traces this transformation, revealing how equality finally became a concrete and actionable political ideal.
Crucially, Professor Bejan shows that influential early modern theorists of equality—chief among them Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the early feminist Mary Astell—were responding to the increasingly radical visions proffered by contemporary social movements like the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers. Inspired by the Leveller leader John Lilburne, these movements insisted that equality must be a basis on which ordinary men and women could demand to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with elites. These early modern activists and philosophers can still enchant us today, Dr. Bejan argues, while also helping us to restore the power of equality as a political ideal.
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.

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Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Susanne Yuk-Ping Choi examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people.
Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Dr. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate sexual possibilities opened up by marketization and digitalization while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and gender norms. The book demonstrates that younger Chinese people’s efforts to resist traditional obligations and pursue nonnormative life projects are relational, partial, and intersectional, shaped through encounters with changing configurations of power and inequality at the intersection of global forces and local histories.
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.

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