New Books Network

From disability metaphors to narratives structured around bodies presented as aberrant, early medieval English thoughtworlds conveyed the promise of resurrection and the hope of salvation through crip and disabled bodies. Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature (U Michigan Press, 2025) argues that early medieval Christian eschatology, as manifested in Old English literary texts, was a crip eschatology: a theology of the afterlife that relied upon disabled bodies and concepts related to disability in order to convey promises of resurrection and salvation. In addition to demonstrating how literature manifested theological approaches to the afterlife, Leah Pope Parker articulates the ways of thinking about bodies and disability that were available to ordinary early medieval people, many of whom experienced their bodies in ways that resonate with what we call disability today, but who rarely appear in the historical record.

By analyzing Old English texts, including Alfredian translations, Ælfric's saints' lives, and poetry from the Exeter and Vercelli Books, Parker introduces novel ways of characterizing disability's effects in literature. "Spiritual prosthesis" reveals rhetorical, narrative, and theological reliance upon disability to convey the promise of a Christian afterlife. "Systems of aberrance" emerge as a result, in which bodies marked as deviant--including disabled, monstrous, heroic, saintly, and dead bodies--form a network of embodiments that reinforce the narratives they inhabit and that of Christian salvation history. Locating crip eschatology in early medieval literature, Light of the Everlasting Life rewrites standard histories of disability, of the body, and of medieval Christian eschatology.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The
early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia.
The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution,
and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance
expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage
lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State
(Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Michelle Bigenho and Dr. Henry
Stobart unpacks the myriad motivations for heritage making in this this
politically transformative moment. Heritage Fever reorients
UNESCO-driven heritage debates towards a different set of questions—a pivot the authors call “heritage otherwise.”

These
inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and
engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and
Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate
aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities.
Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of
scale within the country's new political autonomies, even as old-style
nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights
imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing
historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades.

Privileging
the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically
involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever's
research draws from the authors' combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the
last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and
ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in
heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical
heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever
looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on
archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and
knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a
decolonizing state.

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/new-books-network

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and
sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change—floods, land loss and shifting shorelines—carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. With clarity and insight, it also brings to life the tellers and collectors of these stories, tracing how oral knowledge endured even as literacy spread. A compelling invitation to listen again to old stories, and to hear what the land and sea remember.

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/new-books-network

In times of deep uncertainty, the university needs to transform
itself into an entrepreneurial entity to maintain long-term evolutionary
fitness. Dynamic Universities (Cambridge University Press, 2026) explores
how strategic, entrepreneurial leadership can help US higher education
institutions thrive amid unprecedented challenges. Drawing on the
dynamic capabilities’ framework, David J. Teece and Sohvi Heaton provide a strategic roadmap to help university leaders identify
emerging opportunities and threats, take decisive action, and sustain
competitiveness. Through compelling case studies including Stanford and
Berkeley and interviews with global university leaders, this book offers
practical insights into managing complexity, fostering innovation, and
building resilient academic ecosystems.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In his novel China Running Dog (Plum Rain Press, 2025), a young man in his early twenties lives in Shanghai in the year 2000, in a greed-crazed free-for-all moral and lawless vacuum created by the Chinese Communist Party. Johnny Trent, small-time entrepreneur from Basildon in the UK, ends up in China, where he meets Felix Fawcett-Smith, fresh off the boat and from the other side of the tracks. An unlikely friendship begins.

Johnny impresses the well-bred Felix with his street smarts until Felix takes Johnny’s advice too literally – and too far – and slips into Shanghai’s murky underbelly. He enters a world where the Party, power, and connections to them, are all that matter, where criminals are given sainthoods and saints sent to hell.

Johnny tries to stop Felix’s spiral, not least because Felix is taking a sweet, angelic girl, Anita, down with him and Johnny has feelings for Anita that he has never dared to put into words. But Felix thinks he knows best. Like Johnny, all he wants is respect.

It’s up to Johnny to save whoever he can, besides himself.

Books mentioned in this podcast: Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui, Shanghai by Richie Yokomitsu (transl. Dennis Washburn), Candy by Mian Mian
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network