New Books with Miranda Melcher

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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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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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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