New Books with Miranda Melcher

We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested
reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher
principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what
springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities:
cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly
mowed quads.

The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard
University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at
the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each
chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk,
paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate
connections between the university’s shifting physical form and its
evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of
Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in
otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at
postcolonial Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows
how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on
generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture.
Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social
space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before
worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial
intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor
would become more important than research and education, that the allure
of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline.

A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that,
even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable.
The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone,
brick, and steel are here to stay.

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

How
can a nation with unmatched wealth and medical innovation also have the
highest health care costs and the poorest health outcomes among its
peers? In America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. John E. McDonough offers a
compelling explanation for this troubling puzzle of contemporary US life
and shows that this reality did not arise by accident.

Beginning
in the later twentieth century, a powerful political and economic
philosophy began to reshape the United States and continues to mold
the institutions that govern health care, insurance coverage, and
population health. Across four decades, the rise of neoliberal thinking
elevated privatization, deregulation, and profit maximization as guiding
principles for public policy. Dr. McDonough illustrates how these ideas
influenced medical care at every level, altering government roles,
accelerating consolidation, encouraging the financialization of
once-mission-driven sectors, and shifting the US health system's
priorities away from patients and communities. The consequences of these
changes include deepening inequality, eroded public health capacity,
and a growing burden of medical debt.

Synthesizing
history, policy analysis, and the lived realities of the American
health system, Dr. McDonough reveals how a national commitment to
economic freedom above all else
set the stage for today's dysfunctional health care system. Despite
today's crises, he also highlights emerging efforts that signal the
possibility of a new direction, one based on fairness, accountability,
and the restoration of health as a public value. America's Wrong Turn
offers a framework for understanding how the United States arrived at
this moment and what it will take to create a system worthy of the
people it serves.

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

Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest (U Nebraska Press, 2026) centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it “Utopia on the Prairie,” home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Dr. Margaret E. Farrar and Dr. Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization.

Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century.

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

Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums (Cornell University Press, 2026) reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land and increasingly populated by political exiles, as active sites of ethnographic knowledge-making and centers of scientific research, regional identity, and colonial authority. Rather than collecting from distant colonies, these institutions concentrated on surrounding communities, their tools, beliefs, and everyday lives, to configure ideas about what counted as legitimate knowledge.

Dr. Marisa Karyl Franz traces how Siberian museums helped construct shamanism as an ethnographic category. Shamans, while familiar and embedded in local space, were recast as icons of cultural otherness or representatives of an imagined primitive past. Through the evolving languages of science, anthropology, and empire, the local was abstracted and exported, feeding global museum networks and shaping modern anthropology. Yet, the museums held onto the intimacy of place, preserving tensions between familiarity and spectacle, documentation and desire.

By placing Siberia at the center of a broader intellectual and political history, Near and Desired Things challenges assumptions about where modern knowledge is made and redefines provincial spaces as sites of innovation and as forces that reshape the terms of 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

Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is an Element which centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Pacific brought white supremacy and colonial rule into alignment. It also threw into greater relief the contradictions of US
citizenship and national identity as legalized segregation and rising anti-Black violence foreclosed Reconstruction's possibilities. Race accrued dynamic new meanings in the age of new imperialism.

Focusing on the earliest of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1900–09) and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7), in this Element, Dr. Edlie L. Wong examines the formative role of magazine and periodical writings in the development of early Black transpacific internationalism.

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