New Books Network

Immigration agents have a frontline view of the racial, economic, and legal inequalities that undocumented migration reflects—and yet most agents do not think of the role their jobs play in those inequalities. Instead, they consider themselves law enforcers, trained to confine their work strictly to crime control and security. In Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality (Princeton UP, 2025), Dr. Irene Vega offers an original, detailed analysis of the rationales that shape how U.S. immigration agents understand and carry out their professional responsibilities. Drawing on interviews with ninety immigration agents—Border Patrol Agents and ICE Deportation Officers, most of whom are Mexican Americans from the region around the border—Dr. Vega examines why they took the job and how their training and socialization shape the ways that they grapple with the racial and moral issues raised by their work.Dr. Vega shows that indifference is the bureaucratic resource that allows agents to look away from the most morally ambiguous aspects of their work and helps them cultivate legitimacy for their employer. She traces the development of the agents’ “moral economy”—the configuration of norms, values, and sensibilities that undergirds how they perform their work. She also shows how the immigration system benefits from minoritized bureaucrats’ labor. With Bordering on Indifference, Dr. Vega opens the closed doors of nondescript government buildings and goes into remote areas of the Southwestern borderlands to uncover the hidden normative world that immigration enforcement agents inhabit.

Guest: Dr. Irene I. Vega is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She studies how the United States regulates international migration, as well as migrants and their descendants.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders

Immigration Realities

We Are Not Dreamers

Secret Harvests

Who Gets Believed

In The Care of Foreigners

In The Garden Behind The Moon

We Take Our Cities With Us

The Translators Daughter

Reunited

Sin Padres Ni Papeles

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Every day, tens of millions of people use mantras all around the globe. Originating in South Asia and then spreading via practitioners, texts, rituals, and iconography, mantras have been grounded in speech and sound but also take a range of material forms. For instance, they are inscribed on surfaces, written in manuscripts, printed on posters, visually encoded in diagrams, or worn as amulets and textiles. Not surprisingly, mantras also circulate widely in digital spaces.

In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Xenia Zeiler from the University of Helsinki talks to Prof. Borayin Larios about the ERC Synergy project MANTRAMS - Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia, and about digital mantra research. Funded by a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council, MANTRAMS is a pioneering, large-scale research project entirely dedicated to mantras, past and present. The interdisciplinary and comparative six-year project will investigate mantras across millennia and around the world, examining the roots of mantra, their circulation across South and Southeast Asia, and their transcultural significance in global contexts today.

Borayin Larios is Assistant Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Vienna. His research interests span contemporary and classical Indian religious traditions, including the anthropology and history of mantras, popular and everyday Hinduism, material religion, and Yoga and Tantra traditions. In his interdisciplinary approach, he combines cultural anthropology, religious studies, and historical philology. He is a Principal Investigator in the ERC Synergy project MANTRAMS - Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia.

Xenia Zeiler is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research and teaching are situated at the intersection of digital media, culture, and society, specifically as related to India and global Indian communities. Her focus within this wider field of digital culture is video games and gaming research, in India and beyond. She also researches and teaches digital religion, popular culture, cultural heritage, and mediatization processes.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press, 2026) talks with Yulia Gradskova and Ieva Bisigirskaitė, two of the three authors behind Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Cases from Lithuania, Russia and Sweden. Together with Soheyla Yazdanpanah, they explore what nationalists mean by "good mothers," demographic anxiety, and maternal activism in Lithuania, Russia and Sweden.

You can purchase a copy here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more:

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God’s Own Land: Sacred Landscape, Pilgrim Economy and Religious Change in the Ganga Himalaya (Lever Press, 2026) follows the tectonic shift from traditional religious pilgrimage in the early twentieth-century to contemporary pilgrim tourism, in which ever-burgeoning visitor numbers have brought both benefits and challenges to the Garhwal region of India—the source of Hindu India’s sacred river, the Ganges. Despite Hinduism’s regional and sectarian variation, India’s Garhwal Himalaya region is one the most sacred places to Hindus, drawing pilgrims across sectarian lines from throughout the subcontinent and the world. This sacred land—dev bhumi or “land of the gods”—appears in foundational Hindu stories describing the presence and activity of gods, goddesses, saints, and cultural heroes.This study from James G. Lochtefeld draws out Hindu convictions regarding the Garhwal’s eternal and continuing sanctity as a holy region, based on the premise of an “imagined landscape.” This region is strongly associated with divine activity and yet this landscape is also a real place with a real history inhabited by real people, who have historically been poor because of the challenges created by the region’s geography. Juxtaposing the history of the region with its construction in the Hindu imaginary, this multidisciplinary study unpacks the nuanced image of the region, its religious significance, and the impacts of pilgrimages on the community through textual, historical, and ethnographic methods.
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In this New Books Network interview, Professor Željko Stanojević speaks with Professor Yigal Levin of Bar-Ilan University about his new book, The Chronicles of David and Solomon: 1 Chronicles 10–2 Chronicles 9: A New Translation and Commentary, published by Bloomsbury.

The conversation explores what is new in Levin’s translation and commentary, how the Book of Chronicles reshapes the stories of David and Solomon, and why Jerusalem, the Temple, the priesthood, the Levites, geography, political memory, and the idea of “all Israel” are central to the Chronicler’s message.

The book offers a new English translation and detailed commentary on 1 Chronicles 10 through 2 Chronicles 9. It is part of a planned multi-volume commentary. It begins with the death of Saul and follows the Chronicler’s account of David’s rise to power, the establishment of Jerusalem, the transfer of the Ark, the divine promise concerning David’s dynasty, preparations for the Temple, Solomon’s accession, and the construction and dedication of the Jerusalem Temple.

Levin shows that Chronicles does far more than repeat Samuel and Kings. The Chronicler selects, reorganises, expands, and omits earlier material to create a distinctive interpretation of Israel’s past. David is presented above all as the king who prepares Jerusalem, worship, personnel, materials, and institutions for the future Temple, while Solomon completes that project by building and dedicating the Temple.

The volume also examines priests, Levites, musicians, gatekeepers, officials, military groups, tribes, cities, territories, genealogies, and neighbouring peoples. These details are essential for understanding how the Chronicler imagined Israel’s unity, institutions, memory, and identity. Levin combines Biblical Hebrew, textual comparison, historical geography, archaeology, genealogy, literary analysis, and the history of ancient Israel. The commentary is especially valuable for scholars and students of Chronicles, David and Solomon, the Jerusalem Temple, biblical historiography, Persian-period Yehud, Biblical Hebrew, biblical archaeology, and ancient Israelite history.

Professor Yigal Levin is an Israeli historian and biblical scholar at Bar-Ilan University. His research focuses on the history of ancient Israel, the Book of Chronicles, historical geography, biblical archaeology, biblical historiography, genealogies and tribal identity, Persian-period Yehud, and the relationship between biblical texts, geography, archaeology, and history. He is also Director of the Rivlin Institute for the History of the Land of Israel and its Settlement.

Professor Levin is a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal, an international, peer-reviewed, Diamond Open Access journal published by the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade. The journal publishes research in Hebrew language, Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible, Jewish Studies, Semitic linguistics, philology, textual criticism, biblical archaeology, ancient Israelite history, Hebrew literature, manuscript studies, translation, lexicography, and related fields. EHJ does not charge authors submission or publication fees.

Professor Levin has also been announced as a speaker at the international online conference New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies, to be held on 6–8 November 2026. The conference brings together scholars from biblical studies, Hebrew studies, theology, archaeology, Jewish Studies, history, and related disciplines.

The interview is hosted by Professor Željko Stanojević, President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, and European Hebrew Journal, and a New Books Network host for Biblical Studies.European Hebrew Journal

Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature:

Conference: New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies, An International Online Conference Supporting the Diamond Open Access Mission of the European Hebrew Journal
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