New Books Network

This is the first episode in a series that explores the intersections of science and the humanities in university life. In today’s conversation, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is joined by artists Yasmín Hernández and Baruch Vergara for a discussion about Herlihy-Mera's article “The humanities should really matter to STEM disciplines.” They explore the relationship that art and the humanities have with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and consider why that relationship matters more than ever.
The discussion begins with a central question: What can the arts and humanities contribute to STEM education? If art cultivates forms of observation, experimentation, imagination, interpretation, and creative problem-solving that are essential to scientific and technological work, how can educators work within institutions that separate the Humanities from STEM experiences? What might change if scientists used art and visual thinking as approaches to problem solving? How would science change if art became a tool for empirical inquiry? And, looking in the other direction, what can science teach the humanities about the mind, perception and the boundaries of what we know?
These questions become especially urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.
This series asks us to reconsider the boundaries between disciplines. At stake is more than the future of the university. It is what kinds of intelligence we want our universities to cultivate - and also, what kinds of experiences we want students to have as they learn, explore, and make sense of their worlds.
The Instituto Nuevos Horizontes is housed at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.
Quotes, themes, and ideas from this conversation:

• The STEM-ification of the university, expansion of majors and programs
• Decline and elimination of humanities, arts, and language programs
• When engineering is a model for other disciplines
• “STEAM” initiatives that add Arts to STEM
• Emphasis on technical skills over interpretive faculties
• “Career readiness” over “citizenship” as an institutional objective
• The STEM-ification of the university

“Painting is solving a problem on canvas.” -Yasmín Hernández
“Children are conditioned to make that division (between STEM and the Arts) since elementary school.” -Yasmín Hernández
“Experimentation is what brings curiosity. It is not a precise thing. Art is a new way to look.” -Baruch Vergara
“An image can express a pre-linguistic relationship that we have with the idea.” -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
“Play is the first form of experimentation...you free yourself from the expected outcome.” -Yasmín Hernández
“From art comes a new level of awareness, freeing ourselves from the expected outcome to access something that is beyond.” -Yasmín Hernández
“Music is an activity that can access concepts that are beyond consciousness.” -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera

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What can democracies in different parts of the Global South learn from one another - and what can democracies in the Global North learn from them? The Democracy Exchange: South to South is a new mini-series from the People, Power, Politics podcast, bringing together researchers and activists from across the Global South to exchange ideas and experiences of democratic resilience. Produced as part of the Southern-led Approaches to Democratic Resilience project, with support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the series starts with Asia Asks, Latin America Responds. Join Janjira Sombatpoonsiri and Jennifer Cyr as they discuss what makes democracy resilient in Latin America, who the primary resisters are in different countries, and why context is so vital for how democratic erosion, resistance, and recovery occurs in Latin America and across the globe.
Guest:
Jennifer Cyr is Associate Professor of Political Science at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) in Buenos Aires. Her research focuses on political representation, democratisation, and institutional stability and change in Latin America, as well as qualitative and mixed research methods. She is the author of The Fates of Political Parties: Institutional Crisis, Continuity, and Change in Latin America and Focus Groups for the Social Science Researcher. Her recent work examines the challenges facing democratic resilience, including the difficulties democracies face in recovering from periods of authoritarian erosion. She is working on this IDRC-sponsored project with Matías Bianchi (Asuntos del Sur) and Paula Clerici (CONICET-UTDT).
Presenter:
Janjira Sombatpoonsiri is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, and a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). Her research focuses on democratic resilience, civil resistance, protest movements, civic space and digital repression, particularly in Southeast Asia. She leads the Asian component of the Southern-Led Approaches to Democratic Resilience project and has published widely on pro-democracy movements and authoritarian responses to dissent. She is the author of Humor and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia and the forthcoming A Thousand Cuts: Digital Repression and Pro-Democracy Movements in Thailand.
The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!
Transcript here

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The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisdom—is entrench a liberal model of the individual: the self as autonomous and perfectible. Pushing back against these and other received ideas, Rafael Walker offers a self-professed “heretical” view of the history of the American novel in Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel (U Chicago Press, 2025).
A specialist in American and African American literature as well as gender and sexuality studies, Walker is Associate Professor of English and Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College and the editor of new editions of two essential American novels: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929).
In Realism after the Individual, his first book-length study, Walker shows how realist novels written by US authors from the 1890s to the 1920s transform our understanding of what the novel is and does in the American context. These novels are populated, Walker argues, with “post-individualist” individuals, particularly women, who want new things endlessly and who especially want what other people want—because they've adapted to America's brave new world of capitalist consumption and mass culture.
In this conversation with Alix Beeston, Walker ranges widely and expertly across literary and intellectual history as he shares about women with insatiable desires, men who are killed off for not desiring enough, and the resonances between early twentieth-century literature and the present political moment. He also offers some recommendations for the important but now all-but-forgotten realist novels we should all be reading.

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Why would a government bother to go after groups that carry no weapons and hold no power? Suparna Chaudhry argues that the answer says a lot about where politics is heading. In Civil Societies and Civil States: Government Repression of NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2026), she shows that states are targeting advocacy organizations less often with violence and more often with laws. These laws cap foreign funding, restrict advocacy, and bury groups in paperwork, to name just a few examples. Because the measures look like routine regulation, they rarely make headlines. Democracies have become as skilled at using them as dictatorships.
We discuss how the fading liberal international order has given governments more freedom to act. We also talk about why urgent threats draw violence while long-term ones draw bureaucracy, and how lawmakers copy each other's anti-NGO laws word for word. We then look at why China tolerates Greenpeace, how one Ethiopian law closed nearly 90 percent of the country's human rights groups, and what shrinking aid budgets mean for the sector.
Our guest is Suparna Chaudhry, an Associate Professor in the Department of International Affairs at Lewis & Clark College.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Samantha: The Next Chapter (American Girl Publishing, 2026). From American Girl and New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis comes the next chapter of Samantha Parkington's story--now an adult searching for justice after her legacy is stolen in New York City in 1920. It’s 1920, and 25-year-old Samantha Parkington is working hard to educate women in New York about suffrage and encourage them to vote in their first presidential election that fall. But when Samantha’s large inheritance, including her childhood Mount Bedford home, is stolen in a shocking scheme, she goes from socialite to shop girl overnight and experiences a very different side of New York City living in a boarding house. Searching for clues regarding the theft of her inheritance, she infiltrates the business of a notorious criminal in New York City. Determined as ever, Samantha will do whatever it takes to find answers and save her family’s legacy.

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