New Books with Miranda Melcher

The
number of people in the world with a bank account or money service
provider increased by 2 billion over the past decade. This phenomenon
reflects what Dr. Tyler Girard calls the global financial inclusion
agenda. This agenda emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and
quickly became a prominent feature of global economic governance. 

The
core idea of financial inclusion is that all individuals and businesses
should have access to and use formal financial services, including bank
accounts, payment services, credit, and insurance. Today, the
widespread ability to digitally store and transfer money has impacted
every aspect of our lives. What explains the emergence and evolution of
the global financial inclusion agenda? And what does the politics of
the agenda tell us about the impacts of new technologies on global politics and how ideas become global agendas? 

Drawing
on an original collection of primary documents and interviews with
elites from Ghana, the United Kingdom, the United States, and
Switzerland, Financial Inclusion: How an Idea Became a Global Agenda (Stanford University Press, 2026) traces the global financial inclusion
agenda over time and interrogates its adaptation in specific contexts
and issue areas. Through the concept of participatory ambiguity, Dr.
Girard offers a novel explanation of the agenda that advances important
debates in international relations and international political economy
on the distribution of power and authority in global governance.

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

Anyone
alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of
species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of
ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or
as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass
extinction?

Extinction, Professor Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept—and a phenomenon that’s
not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth
century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of
God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil
evidence to determine
that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a
lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans.
Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to
pervasive, and even inevitable.

Yet Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Penguin, 2025) shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s
a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans
and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural
process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations
from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die
out from imperial expansion.

Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished
weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking
storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a
human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future.

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

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