New Books with Miranda Melcher

The English Christmas carol has been sung in court and cloister, tavern and field since medieval times. But with the first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880—and with a view to encouraging revellers into church—the humble carol became integral to the Christmas tradition. Carol concerts are attended all over the world, and the service at King’s College, Cambridge, has been broadcast since 1928 to millions of listeners.
In Christmas Carols: An English Enchantment (Yale University Press, 2026), singer and author John Potter guides us through the development of this unique tradition. Carols, originating as secular delights of the medieval and Tudor court and chapel, were brought by the Victorians to a new urban audience. Priests, poets, and composers have rearranged ancient songs and created new ones ever since, incorporating European carols into the evolving English tradition.
Taking us from their earliest origin to their flourishing during the early music revival, this is an enlightening account of a beloved phenomenon.

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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In American history, few tragedies have been as consequential—and as enduringly misunderstood—as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Long remembered as a turning point in the struggle for labor protections, Fire in the Heart of the City: The Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Charity (NYU Press, 2026) shows how the fire also helped transform another cornerstone of modern American life: the rise of modern charity.

Set in early twentieth-century New York, the book tells the extraordinary story of what happened when a catastrophic fire in Greenwich Village threw Adolph Ochs, the ambitious new publisher of the New York Times, and Rose Schneiderman, a defiant young labor organizer, into a momentous struggle over who should organize the city’s response: a rising charity sector led by wealthy financiers and civic elites, or the reform-minded unions and activists of Lower Manhattan.

Drawing on newly released archival documents, interviews with the descendants of Times publisher Adolph Ochs and New York labor organizers, previously confidential reports, and long-overlooked private diaries and correspondence, David Conrad-Pérez offers a striking new account of the disaster and its aftermath. He shows how a handful of charities on the brink of irrelevance were suddenly recast as New York’s best answer to the social and economic conditions the fire laid bare—a watershed moment in the rise of modern charity and elite authority over social welfare in the United States.
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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Why was the Japanese Army so brutal before and during World War Two? This haunting question anchors a sweeping investigation into the moral universe of Imperial Japan’s soldiers, tracing their path from the twilight of the samurai age to the ashes of Manila in 1945.
Punishment: Behind Japanese Military Brutality (Hurst, 2026) by Professor Danny Orbach uncovers a world in which war was conceived not merely as combat, but also as justice. Officers and soldiers learned to navigate two rival visions of war: one restrained by the ‘foreign gaze’ of the Western world, the other rooted in older traditions that cast adversaries as ‘rebels’ and ‘bandits’ deserving exemplary punishment. However, these competing strategies were intertwined, in an interplay of mutual mitigation and brutalisation. Drawing on archival material in six languages and fieldwork conducted across Asia—from Taiwan’s indigenous highlands to Manchuria’s sorghum fields and the streets of Nanjing—Professor Orbach reveals how ambiguity, obedience, fear and ideology converged on the battlefield. Vague orders could become massacres, and the boundary between necessity and cruelty became perilously thin.
Part detective story, part moral history, Punishment illuminates how a modern state slid into devastating violence—and why that descent was neither inevitable nor easily explained.
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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Who has the “right” to learn Mandarin Chinese? In Multiracial Mandarin: Asian Americans and Impossible Language (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. David Shuang Song examines how matters of race and privilege shape US Mandarin language education and who has access to it. Through a two-year ethnographic study of two Bay Area high schools where diasporic and heritage speakers learn Mandarin alongside Black and Latinx students, Song advances a sociological and educational–linguistic inquiry into how language interacts with our understanding of identity and equity.
Comparing classroom activities in two public schools, Dr. Song investigates teachers who seek to make Mandarin accessible while detaching it from its cultural roots. As he explores the difficulties of limited resources, racial inequality, and pedagogical practices inherent in multiracial Mandarin instruction, Dr. Song shows how language education complicates how educators understand Asian American students and troubles conventional conversations around race and racial equity in schools.
Arguing that language practice and instruction must always be considered in relation to diaspora, ethnicity, and racialization, Multiracial Mandarin offers a frank analysis of the risks and benefits of teaching a diasporic language and asks if this practice ought to be replicated in more schools. As he applies innovative conceptual frameworks for talking about language among Asian Americans, Dr. Song’s timely and theoretically sophisticated analysis has wide-ranging implications for how students, teachers, and administrators approach essential questions around education, privilege, and language survival.
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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