New Books in Popular Culture
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New Books in Popular Culture
Interviews with Scholars of Popular Culture about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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Doug MacCash, "Mardi Gras Beads" (Louisiana UP, 2022)
The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebrated...
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of S...
Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees)....
Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)
“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor...
Pluribus Episode 3 Analysis: The Amazonification of Everything
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the third episode of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. We talk through this episode as a literaliz...
Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has...
Sophie Bishop, "Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture" (U California Press, 2025)
How are influencers changing the arts? In Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture (U California...
James Brown's War on Disco
In the penultimate episode of season 2 of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares sit down with acclaimed historian Alice Echols, autho...
James Trefil and Shobita Satyapal, "Supermassive: Black Holes at the Beginning and End of the Universe" (Smithsonian Books, 2025)
Black holes, demystified: follow along the quest to understand the history and influence of one of space science's most fascinating and confounding ph...
Marcus Chown, "A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage" (Apollo, 2025)
What is space? What is time? Where did the universe come from? The answers to mankind's most enduring questions may lie in science's greatest enigma:...
Julie Fette, "Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature" (Routledge, 2025)
Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literat...
Springsteen’s "Nebraska" as a Political, Sonic, and Personal Document
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we consider Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska as personal and political document. With the release of the N...
Springsteen’s "Nebraska" as a Political, Sonic, and Personal Document
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we consider Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska as personal and political document. With the release of the N...
Rebecca van Laer, "Cat" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Dr. Rebecca van Laer and her partner purchase a home and move in with their senior cats, Toby and Gus. Their loved ones see this as a step toward an i...
Michael Maniates, "The Living-Green Myth" (Polity Press, 2025)
Dr. Michael F. Maniates is a leading scholar in environmental politics and sustainability studies whose work has fundamentally reshaped how researcher...
Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the...
Brian Baker, "The Road" (Akashic Books, 2025)
The Road (Akashic Books, 2025) is an illuminating selection of photographs spanning iconic punk rock guitarist Brian Baker’s many years of global tour...
Disco's Revenge
In the wake of Disco Demolition Night in 1979—a cultural bonfire that seemed to signal the end of disco—something unexpected began to rise from Chicag...
Kubrick’s Worlds: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition
In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley...
Gilles Deleuze, "On Painting" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Charles J. Stivale (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University) and Dan Smith (Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University) join me to di...
Hector Vera, "Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)
Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its...
Harry Cliff, "Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe" (Doubleday, 2024)
Nothing captivates the human imagination like the vast unknowns of space. Ancient petroglyphs present renderings of the heavens, proof that we have be...
Scott D. Anthony, "Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World" (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025)
Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025) arrives at the perfect moment as artificial intell...
What Do You Want Out of Life? A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters
What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money, work for justice, run marathons, sing in a choir, have children, travel the world? The things we...
Greg Soden, "Unscripted Moments: Conversations with Propagandhi (2020-2025)" (Earth Island Books, 2025)
Propagandhi formed in 1986 in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Canada and are now based in Winnipeg. Their outspoken influence and consistency in anti-fa...
Carl Rollyson, "The Making of Sylvia Plath (UP Mississippi, 2024)
Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her se...
Megan Walsh, "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters" (Columbia Global Reports, 2022)
What does contemporary China’s diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics?
The...
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it....
Stevie Suan, "Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its...
Bradley Morgan, "U2: Until the End of the World" (Weldon Owen, 2025)
Bradley Morgan’s U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025) celebrates fifty years of U2 with a career-spanning retrospective featuring more...
Arnar Eggert Thoroddsen, "Icelandic Pop: Then, Today, Tomorrow, Next Week" (Reaktion Books, 2025)
Iceland punches well above its weight in the world of music, producing global icons like Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men, and Laufey, while at t...
The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit
As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. Th...
Maggie Gram, "The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History" (Basic Books, 2025)
Maggie Gram is a writer, cultural historian, and designer. She leads an experience-design team at Google. She has taught at the Maryland Institute Col...
Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh J. Warren eds., "Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), edited by Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh...
Signal Award Re-Release: Lost Women of Disco
We're thrilled to announce that our episode “S2.E2. Lost Women of Disco” has been named a finalist in the Best Indie Podcast category at the 2025 Sign...
Jason Schneider, "That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of Hey Joe' and Popular Music's History of Violence" (Anvil Press, 2025)
This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music. “Hey Joe” was written sometime i...
Lorraine Besser, "The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It" (Balance, 2024)
What is a good life? Traditionally, philosophers have seen it as an equation: The Good Life = Happiness + Meaning. But, if it's really that simple, wh...
Chris Dalla Riva, "Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Popular music history collides with data analytics, charts, and numbers in this insightful and surprising look at the greatest hits and musicians, fad...
Matthias Egeler, "Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld" (Yale UP, 2025)
Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings...
John R. Davis, "Keep Your Ear to the Ground: A History of Punk Fanzines in Washington, DC" (Georgetown UP, 2025)
John R. Davis's Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Georgetown University Press, 2025) is the first history of the fanzines that emerged from Washington, DC'...