New Books in Environmental Studies

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures.

Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by
centering Tuskegee’svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the
diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee’s methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

In
contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and
premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and
practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture.
Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically
Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps
Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very
soil.

Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves.

Americans
spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds
of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and
maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely
and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al
deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and
environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through
the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself.

From
tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to
soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes
readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human
habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii to contemporary Hong
Kong, industrial-age Liverpool to postwar Levittown, Al shows how our
choices in housing have both reflected and affected ideas about gender
roles, privacy, and comfort. Discover how seemingly mundane
elements―like door-knockers
and corridors―have altered everyday interactions, and how material
choices have remade the planet’s surface. He also confronts the darker
side of domesticity, exposing the unintended consequences of our
architectural choices across millennia, including smoke-filled Neolithic
dwellings, deadly fires in crowded Roman apartment buildings, and
worsening social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. Finally, he
examines the myths and reality of future housing, including 3D-printed
homes and space architecture built by robots.

Drawing from personal experiences
across global cities and professional insights, Al illuminates how our
choices in housing continue to influence everything from social
relationships to climate change, ultimately arguing
that understanding this rich history is crucial for building a more
sustainable future. With billions more people needing housing in the
coming decades, Dwelling on Earth reveals how we might transform humanity’s defining challenge into our greatest opportunity.

HOST BIO: Alex Hallbom is an urban planner and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

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
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Republicanism is arguably the most powerful political idea in
history, an extraordinary feat of human imagination that balances
individual liberty with collective responsibility. The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World (Princeton
University Press, 2026) reclaims this idea as the path to sustaining
our life together on a changing planet, reframing our relationship to
the environment not as a constraint on liberty but as its republican
foundation.
Giulio Boccaletti argues that we must renew our commitment to freedom
and civic responsibility through popular sovereignty. He presents the
environmental republic as a necessary alternative to blind faith in
technocratic management, the shallow moralizing and apocalyptic rhetoric
of some activists, and the disingenuous skepticism of vested interests.
Our environmental challenges are not simply about “agreeing on the
facts” or living within technical limitations—they reflect a deeper
failure of political institutions. Drawing on the history of ideas and
real-world examples, Boccaletti presents a political framework that
places our relationship to our surroundings at the heart of how we
exercise our voice, coordinate collective action, and define development
itself.
Offering hope in an anxious age of rising authoritarianism and widespread pessimism, The Environmental Republic
challenges the false choice between environmental protection and human
freedom, showing how place-based institutions can deliver both
sustainability and human development through true self-governance.

Giulio Boccaletti
is an author whose writings on natural resources security have been
translated into several languages. He has held international leadership
positions in the private and not-for-profit sectors. He is the
scientific director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change,
one of Europe’s largest research institutions focused on Earth science
and transition economics, and cofounder of Chloris Geospatial, a
space-tech company specializing in Earth observations. His books include
Water: A Biography, and his work has been featured in acclaimed PBS series such as H2O: The Molecule That Made Us, Human Footprint, and The Future of Nature.

Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies