New Books with Miranda Melcher

The
early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia.
The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution,
and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance
expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage
lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State
(Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Michelle Bigenho and Dr. Henry
Stobart unpacks the myriad motivations for heritage making in this this
politically transformative moment. Heritage Fever reorients
UNESCO-driven heritage debates towards a different set of questions—a pivot the authors call “heritage otherwise.”

These
inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and
engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and
Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate
aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities.
Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of
scale within the country's new political autonomies, even as old-style
nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights
imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing
historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades.

Privileging
the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically
involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever's
research draws from the authors' combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the
last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and
ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in
heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical
heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever
looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on
archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and
knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a
decolonizing state.

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

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and
sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change—floods, land loss and shifting shorelines—carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. With clarity and insight, it also brings to life the tellers and collectors of these stories, tracing how oral knowledge endured even as literacy spread. A compelling invitation to listen again to old stories, and to hear what the land and sea remember.

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

Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms
(Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden
imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors,
revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify
control, including its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the Tsarist
empire to Putin’s digital propaganda, Dr. Bogatova examines how Russia
portrays itself as a disciplining “father,” a self-sacrificing “mother,”
or an “elder brother” to post-Soviet states, protecting, subjugating,
and manipulating them in the name of unity. 

Blending
psychology, discourse analysis, and historical inquiry, this
groundbreaking book exposes how language sanitizes oppression,
legitimizes conquest, and sustains imperial ambitions. A
thought-provoking exploration of power, ideology, and resistance, it
offers a fresh perspective on Russia’s enduring influence over its
former empire.

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 United States’ superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program.

Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.

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

Born in 1102, Empress Matilda combined the blood of two dynasties: the house of Wessex and their conquerors, the dukes of Normandy. As a widowed German empress, she was named as heir successor by her father, Henry I. But, after his death in 1135, Matilda’s place on the English throne was usurped by her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Civil war followed, and she ruled the south-west of England in opposition.

In Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Elisabeth van Houts explores the remarkable life of medieval England’s only queen regnant. Van Houts examines female rulership in the Middle Ages, from Matilda’s relationships with her husbands, to her self-identification as granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Matilda used her persuasiveness effectively with the men who surrounded her, including her father, husbands, half-brothers and cousins.

This is a fascinating account, which reveals Matilda to be an assertive, if on occasion disappointed, woman who made the best of her position with intelligence and stamina.

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