New Books in Communications

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Episodes

Ryan Engley, "Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

August 23, 2026 • 83 mins

This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one. The serial is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative—from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books—seriality names the spread of installment-based ...

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Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, "Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination" (Polity, 2027)

August 23, 2026 • 70 mins

What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for? In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027). For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of acceleration: producing more stories, for...

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Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

August 20, 2026 • 53 mins

Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine...

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Vincent Haddad, "Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

August 18, 2026 • 52 mins

Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Vincent Haddad investigates how the franchise has maintained huge global demand despite its formulaic plotlines. Examining its exhaustive repetition of storytelling forms across comics, TV...

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Karen M'Closkey and Keith VanDerSys eds., "Media Matters in Landscape Architecture" (Applied Research & Design, 2025)

August 16, 2026 • 53 mins

Media Matters in Landscape Architecture (Applied Research & Design, 2025) goes behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged in recent decades are shaping the practices of artists, designers, engineers, and scientists. The media infrastructure of climate science and Earth remote sensing, coupled with the increased availability of spatial information and modeling software, provides the con...

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Linda Williams and eds. Christine Gledhill et al., "Melodrama As Provocateur" (Duke UP, 2026)

August 14, 2026 • 70 mins

The centerpiece of Melodrama as Provocateur (Duke UP, 2026) is an essay by Linda Williams (1946–2025). Williams was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her highly influential work reframed some of cinema’s most neglected or denigrated genres from a feminist perspective, including documentary, pornography, horror, and melodrama. Melodrama is the focus of what would...

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Caryl Flinn and Dana B. Polan, "The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette" (Oxford UP, 2026)

August 9, 2026 • 55 mins

In The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette (Oxford UP, 2026), the first ever published on The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), Caryl Flinn and Dana Polan examine the significance of this classic US sitcom within popular culture and within American society at the time. Child acting sensation Patty Duke plays the all-American Patty as well as her staid British counterpart Cathy, who com...

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In The Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship

August 6, 2026 • 59 mins

For centuries, many of the world’s most influential thinkers relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying. In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship (Princeton UP, 2026) introduces readers to these unsung scribes, assistants, and collaborators, showing how the scholarly enterprise is rarely as solitar...

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Katharina Stevens, "The Ethics of Argumentation" (Routledge, 2025)

August 5, 2026 • 61 mins

The Ethics of Argumentation (Routledge, 2025) offers a new approach to the theory of argumentation that conceptualizes argumentation as a fundamentally ethical activity whose norms are grounded in, and must be selected according to, moral reasons. Current normative approaches to argumentation do not treat ethics as an integral part of argumentation theory. This is at least in part due to a methodological commitment not to...

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Elizabeth Darling, "Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–32" (Lund Humphries, 2026)

August 3, 2026 • 57 mins

Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932 (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades, with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that these environments were as constitutive of the Corporation’s ident...

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James W. Cortada, "Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

August 3, 2026 • 49 mins

Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times (Bloomsbury, 2025) describes tacit knowledge, what it is, how it used and its role in our current data driven world. Author James Cortada argues that fuzzy, hard-to describe information is greater and more, important than just hard facts. What is tacit knowledge? It is what we might consider knowledge that is unable to be fully communicated; k...

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Emily Sneff, "When the Declaration of Independence Was News" (Oxford UP, 2026)

August 3, 2026 • 43 mins

Amy Weitzman interviews Emily Sneff on her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News and the graduate school experience. In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting t...

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Paulina Banas, "Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century" (American University in Cairo Press, 2025)

August 2, 2026 • 51 mins

Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East. In her debut book, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book P...

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Eric O Silva, "Contested Realities and Identity Destigmatization: Identity Construction in the Culture Wars" (De Gruyter, 2026)

August 2, 2026 • 41 mins

Much scholarship has sought to decode the polarization of American culture. Eric O Silva's analysis of the public discourse on contested realities (immigration, vaccines, electric vehicles, transgender youth medicine, campus protests of Israel, the regulation of AR-15s, and race and police brutality) reveals that Americans are not governed by coherent, diametrically opposed worldviews. U.S. culture is more fractured ...

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Siri Carpenter on Why She Self-Published First — and How It Led to a Traditional Book Deal

July 30, 2026 • 25 mins

What does it take to turn a self-published book into a traditional publishing deal? Science writer Siri Carpenter — executive director of The Open Notebook and author of The Craft of Science Writing — joins host Sarah Russo on The Publishing Playbook to break down her path from self-publishing to an expanded second edition with University of Chicago Press. Siri shares how she landed an agent after self-publis...

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Lana Swartz on Digital Money and Digital Cultures of Money

July 27, 2026 • 84 mins

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Lana Swartz, Associate Professor of Media Studies and Shannon Mid-Career at the University of Virginia, where she runs the Digital Cultures and Economies Lab. Swartz is a creative and wide-ranging thinker and researcher. The pair focuses on Swartz's book, New Money: How Payment Became social media, and talks about her recent work on youth money cultures and on the rich business and ...

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Daniel L. Gardner, "Thresholds of Digital Gameplay" (MIT Press, 2025)

July 21, 2026 • 62 mins

Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account logins, controllers, and an assortment of menus, settings, and other peripheral-to-gameplay elements support a range of practical and necessary functions that result from the transformation of gameplay into digital gameplay, as well as broader shifts toward an increasingly networked and dat...

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Stefan Höltgen et al., "Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer" (Projekt Verlag, 2026)

July 20, 2026 • 27 mins

The Commodore 64 is the most signiﬁcant computer of its era. From 1982 to 1994, a total of 27 million units were sold—more than any other computer from a single manufacturer afterwards. Due to its widespread use as well as its technical features, the C64 has a huge international following—even to this day. The 19 contributions compiled in Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer (Projekt Ver...

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Hector Amaya, "The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification" (Stanford UP 2026)

July 18, 2026 • 56 mins

We use avatars to play video games. We use pseudonyms on social media. We use VPNs to mask our identities and activities. In the digital realm, anonymity is everywhere, a persistent option for those who wish to hide, experiment, and deceive. But we are anonymous in more contexts than the digital. In urban settings, we routinely experience the anonymity of the crowd, and routinely use anonymity to participate in political...

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Laura B. McGrath, "Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction" (Princeton UP, 2026)

July 18, 2026 • 63 mins

In this interview, we speak with Laura B. McGrath, an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2026). Her writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Atlantic. Middlemen rewrites literary history from the perspective of one of its most important but least visible figu...

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New Books in Communications

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ryan Engley, "Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, "Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination" (Polity, 2027)

Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Vincent Haddad, "Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

Karen M'Closkey and Keith VanDerSys eds., "Media Matters in Landscape Architecture" (Applied Research & Design, 2025)

Linda Williams and eds. Christine Gledhill et al., "Melodrama As Provocateur" (Duke UP, 2026)

Caryl Flinn and Dana B. Polan, "The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette" (Oxford UP, 2026)

In The Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship

Katharina Stevens, "The Ethics of Argumentation" (Routledge, 2025)

Elizabeth Darling, "Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–32" (Lund Humphries, 2026)

James W. Cortada, "Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Emily Sneff, "When the Declaration of Independence Was News" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Paulina Banas, "Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century" (American University in Cairo Press, 2025)

Eric O Silva, "Contested Realities and Identity Destigmatization: Identity Construction in the Culture Wars" (De Gruyter, 2026)

Siri Carpenter on Why She Self-Published First — and How It Led to a Traditional Book Deal

Lana Swartz on Digital Money and Digital Cultures of Money

Daniel L. Gardner, "Thresholds of Digital Gameplay" (MIT Press, 2025)

Stefan Höltgen et al., "Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer" (Projekt Verlag, 2026)

Hector Amaya, "The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification" (Stanford UP 2026)

Laura B. McGrath, "Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Popular Podcasts

Ryan Engley, "Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, "Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination" (Polity, 2027)