Marshall Poe
450 episodes listed below
Careful conversations across African studies.
New Books in African Studies is a measured interview series built around recently published scholarship on Africa and diaspora. Its conversations favor context, method, and argument over quick takes, with guests explaining how archives, texts, political transitions, and cultural forms reshape familiar questions.
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New Books in African Studies is a scholarly interview series organized around recently published books on Africa and its diasporas. Its center is the author conversation. Each episode generally begins by naming a book, locating its field, and asking the guest to explain the problem that made the research necessary. The show is measured. It gives time to sources, definitions, historiography, and the limits of what evidence can show. Recent episodes suggest a wide intellectual map. One conversation follows castle slaves on the Gambia River and asks how gender, mortality, coercion, escape, and community formation altered the story of slavery on James Island. Another turns to Nigerian diasporic women’s art, questioning inherited accounts of alienation, disbelonging, pleasure, unruliness, and play. A discussion of Africa Unbound considers freedom, sovereignty, and liberation in contemporary Africa through a decolonial frame. After Liberation examines women and political expectation in rebel-to-party transitions, including the difficult movement from civil war to formal political contestation. Other episodes move through J. E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa, African metaphysics, the Lumière Brothers’ global routes, and African novels as thinking forms. That range is part of the appeal. The show does not flatten African studies into a single discipline or current-events lane. It treats history, politics, literature, philosophy, performance, and cultural studies as adjacent ways of asking how power is organized and how people make meaning within it. The pacing can be formal, and some episodes carry network announcements or sponsor material before the interview settles in. Once there, the conversations are usually sustained and author-led. The interviewer’s work is to frame the question, clarify the argument, and invite the guest to continue. For listeners who want fast narrative polish, the show may feel austere. For readers, students, researchers, and historically minded generalists, that austerity is useful. It preserves the texture of scholarship: uncertainty, method, citation, disagreement, and the long path from a topic to a claim.
Made for: For readers, students, researchers, and historically minded listeners who want sustained conversations about African history, politics, literature, philosophy, and diaspora. It especially suits people who prefer scholarly context to personality-driven commentary.
What sets it apart: The show’s value is its book-first patience: authors are given room to explain evidence, method, and stakes in their own terms. Its range across disciplines makes African studies feel like a connected field rather than a narrow category.
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/african-studies
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Book-centered interviews connect African histories to institutions, political power, and the lived consequences of policy.
New Books in African Studies gives one book at a time enough room to establish its argument, evidence, and stakes. The interviewers press beyond summary, asking how political ideas work through institutions and daily life.
This is where your reading list grows teeth: power crises, slave-castle archives, courts, climate, and Black empowerment.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at slavery, gender, and community along the Gambia River.
This episode is strongest when it stays close to the evidence: the gender imbalance among castle slaves and trade slaves, the higher mortality and lower escape rates among women, and the way women could still hold communal life together under severe coercion.
A clear look at how the European Court of Human Rights was imagined, argued over, and given authority.
The episode turns on a clear founding dilemma for the European Court of Human Rights: whether it was meant chiefly to guard against totalitarian backsliding, or to act as a court whose binding judgments could reshape state behavior.
A careful conversation about electricity, citizenship, and inequality in Ghana.
This episode follows Lauren MacLean as she discusses her book, Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity, and the larger forces that shape daily life there.
A careful look at black empowerment, corporate power, institutional politics, and Booker T. Washington's long shadow.
Jessica Levy's book conversation follows black empowerment politics from Booker T. Washington into corporate and institutional life, with Leon Sullivan and Samuel Matsuyama carrying that history forward.
Climate justice, grounded in race, livelihoods, and lived realities.
Selina Nwulu's Black Climates discussion keeps climate thinking tied to people's daily lives, not treated as a separate lane from race, borders, prisons, disability, or migration.
Abolition comes into focus through one slave owner's status, choices, and resistance to British authority.
Sandra E. Greene turns abolition into a matter of choices, leverage, and social standing. Amigashi emerges as wealthy, influential, and close to the paramount chief in the Angola area, using that position to resist British authority, hold on to enslaved people, block some from…
A measured review of how outside security missions crowded the Sahel, and what can follow when soldiers demobilize.
External intervention in the Sahel gets a steady, useful reading through Nina Wilen's account of how European states and other outside actors came to treat the region as a security problem.
Sharp political debate with policy detail and real disagreement.
Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson debate Canadian politics, from Alberta separatism to Ottawa's bureaucracy.
Robert Evans, Katie Stoll, and Cody Johnston build fake conspiracies and mock right-wing media.
Steve Hayes and Dispatch panelists argue through the week's Iran, DOJ, and Supreme Court news.
Jonah Goldberg's solo political rants and author interviews on conservatism, courts, and current events.
John Donvan moderates two-sided debates on AI, bioethics, feminism, and film's future.
Michael W.
This episode features an interview with Bimbola Akinbola about her book 'Transatlantic Disbelonging', which explores how Nigerian diasporic women's art challenges traditional notions of diaspora through themes of unruliness, pleasure, and play.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
This episode features an interview with Jeanne-Marie Jackson about her new book 'The Letter of the Law in J.
This episode features an interview with a scholar discussing their recently published research in African studies.
An academic interview series where scholars discuss recently published research, with this episode featuring a conversation about a new book on African metaphysics.
An interview with Dr.
An academic interview series where scholars discuss their recently published research in African studies, with this episode featuring a book on Ghana's Cold War entanglements with the Soviet Union.
An interview with Professor Craig Perry about his new book on slavery and the Jews of medieval Egypt.
Maria traces the argument behind regional human rights courts.
The conversation centers on Lauren McLean’s book, *Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity*.
Bridget Wallace speaks with Jessica Levy about the book’s argument on black empowerment politics.
Pauline Heinrichs speaks with Selina Nwulu about Black Climates.
Dr.
An academic interview discussing Dr.
An interview with Ibrahim El-Ghwabli about his book 'Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences'.
An academic interview series where scholars discuss their recently published research in African studies with another expert.
An academic interview series where scholars discuss their recently published research in African studies, with this episode featuring a book on Black and Muslim liberation in the African diaspora.
An academic interview series where scholars discuss their recently published research on African studies topics.
A historian discusses his new book on Ghana's political and social history, exploring the evolving concept of Ghanaian nationhood.
An academic interview podcast where scholars discuss their recently published research in African studies.
An academic interview discussing Dr.
An academic interview discussing Dr.
This episode features an interview with Howard W.
An interview with the authors of a new book about Fela Kuti, discussing his life and music as a weapon for social change.
An academic interview discussing a recently published book in African studies with the author and an expert.
An academic interview with historian Philip Jansen about his book on African and Caribbean geographies of belonging.
This episode is a brief announcement asking listeners to participate in the New Books Network audience survey.
An interview with Dr.
An interview with Dr.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
Miranda Melcher speaks with Nina Wilén about Securitizing the Sahel, a 2025 Oxford University Press book built from about seven years of research on security force assistance in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and beyond.
This episode features an interview with scholar Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré about her book exploring African women's histories within European narratives, focusing on the Afropolitan Krio Fernandino diaspora from 1850 to 1996.
This episode features an interview with Dr.