New Books Network

In this episode Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Alba Kapoor. Kapoor is the racial justice lead at Amnesty International UK and previously led the policy team at the Runnymede Trust. Alba Kapoor shared the cutting edge work that Amnesty International UK is leading around racial justice, the surveilling of black and brown communities in the UK through existing policy infrastructure such as Prevent, or new and emergent facial recognition technologies. She also discussed forthcoming research from Amnesty examining the silencing of pro-Palestine narratives in academic contexts and the broader questions that this raises around freedoms and rights. Finally, Kapoor linked this to the pressing issues posed by the growth of the far-right in the UK.
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2026 marks the 20th year of publishing Genocide Studies International. The journal's first issue was a special issue on genocide in Darfur. Twenty years later, newspapers and podcasts are talking again about mass violence in Sudan.

So I thought it would be a good time to host a discussion among current and former editors of the journal about the state of genocide studies and about how academic journals can contribute to its goals. We talked about the nature of the field of genocide studies, about what it means to be a scholar in a field where activism is common, and about how GSI understands its purpose. And we say a bit to graduate students and early career academics about how to get an article published in GS.

If you're interested in this interview, I'd suggest looking back in the NBGS archives to look for discussions about the purpose of genocide education with Maureen Hiebert and Jim Waller and an interview with John Roth and Carol Rittner about their belief that Holocaust and Genocide education is failing to achieve that purpose.

Genocide Studies International is a journal of the Zoryan Institute and is published by University of Toronto Press. You can find more information about Zoryan here Home - Zoryan Institute and suscribe to the journal here Genocide Studies International Home | University of Toronto Press
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A detailed account of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, a watershed year that closed the book, once and for all, on the Roman Empire and confirmed for Europeans their worst fears about an expanding Ottoman Empire.Anthony Kaldellis offers a new narrative of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, a watershed year that closed the book, once and for all, on the Roman Empire and confirmed for Europeans their worst fears about an expanding Ottoman Empire.

By the fifteenth century, Constantinople had seen better days, but it was still a vibrant center of learning, worship, commerce, and information. 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople (Oxford UP, 2026) sketches the tense but exciting shared world of Italians, Turks, and Romans that was thrown into crisis by Mehmed II's decision to conquer the city. Kaldellis showcases a detailed reconstruction following events on a day-by-day basis, pulling from gripping eye-witness testimonies in Latin, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Turkish. He weighs the strategies of both the attackers and defenders, and proves that, contrary to the fatalism that marks almost all narratives written with hindsight, in reality the defense was hardly a lost cause. The defenders knew exactly what they were doing. They were willing to risk their lives, but it was not their intention to become martyrs. Instead, it was the sultan who was scrambling to neutralize a seemingly impregnable defense. That he did so was a testament to his ingenuity and tenacity.

The final chapters of 1453 trace the fate of the vanquished and their captivity. It also weighs the impact of the city's fall on the conquerors, the conquered, and on world history. 1453 was not merely a symbol for the passing of the Middle Ages and the onset of early modernity: it changed the very nature of the Ottoman empire and redirected the transmission of cultural legacies, especially those of Greek classical scholarship. The fall of Constantinople is therefore a nexus of converging pathways between east and west, medieval and modern, ends and beginnings.
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In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and curated a highly sanitized view of slavery. They imagined a once and future plantation society that would reestablish them as the proper heirs of the slave past. In the process, they crafted a set of dangerously durable and virulent stereotypes about slavery.

Many of the sights and sounds that Americans associate with slavery are rooted in this grandiose historical myth. The image of the Big House, sitting atop carefully manicured rolling green hills, is in large part, a fantasy, as is the idea of the plantation as an expansive family home to chivalrous planters and content slaves. Jason R. Young explores the persistence of these myths and the historical memory of slavery by focusing on the elite white mythmakers who helped shape our understanding of slavery. Examining literature, art, and performance, Young interrogates both the power and the folly of these ideas. In uncovering their origins, The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War (UNC Press, 2026) resists these racial fantasies and challenges their stubborn resurgence in our own time.

You can find Jason Young at the University of Michigan website.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jinwoo Park about his novel, Oxford Soju Club (Dundurn Press, 2025). 

A SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2025 • A CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN FICTION BOOK OF 2025 • A CRIMEREADS BEST BOOK OF 2025 

The natural enemy of a Korean is another Korean. When North Korean spymaster Doha Kim is mysteriously killed in Oxford, his protégé, Yohan Kim, chases the only breadcrumb given to him in Doha’s last breath: “Soju Club, Dr. Ryu.” In the meantime, a Korean American CIA agent , Yunah Choi, races to salvage her investigation of the North Korean spy cell in the aftermath of the assassination. At the centre of it all is the Soju Club, the only Korean restaurant in Oxford, owned by Jihoon Lim, an immigrant from Seoul in search of a new life after suffering a tragedy. As different factions move in with their own agendas, their fates become entangled, resulting in a bitter struggle that will determine whose truth will triumph. Oxford Soju Club weaves a tale of how immigrants in the Korean diaspora are forced to create identities to survive, and how in the end, they must shed those masks and seek their true selves.

Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer based in Montreal. He completed a master's degree in creative writing at the University of Oxford, and currently works as a marketer in the tech industry. In 2021, he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award. Oxford Soju Club is his first novel.
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