British studies through books, archives, and argument.
New Books in British Studies is a book-centered interview series where scholars explain recent research in British history, literature, and culture. Its best conversations move carefully from evidence to argument, using archives, case studies, and contested terms as the path through a book.
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New Books in British Studies is a measured interview series organized around recent scholarly books. Its focus is Britain, but the borders of that subject are deliberately porous. Episodes move through Europe, South America, Ireland, Brittany, and fan cultures when the book requires it. The result is a British studies program less interested in national shorthand than in networks, institutions, archives, and contested forms of belonging. One conversation follows Huguenot correspondence, intercepted letters, ambassadors, couriers, and secrecy in sixteenth-century Europe. Another uses pregnancy and maternity care to think about borders, citizenship, gender, immigration, and healthcare in the United Kingdom. A discussion of revolutions places political upheaval inside a wider historical frame. A study of Offa turns early medieval kingship into a question of power, memory, and evidence. Ancient stones, megaliths, and earthworks become a way to ask how later periods imagined prehistory. Victorian coca is treated not only as a drug history, but as a system of botanical knowledge, trade, pharmacy, and regulation. Football fandom opens onto the performance of Jewishness and the persistence of antisemitism in European club cultures. British screen history becomes a route into audience racism, television archives, and programs whose reception was contested even in their own time. The show is patient. It often starts by naming the intellectual problem of a book, then lets the author explain how the argument works. The interviewers do not rush toward a punchline. They ask for terms to be clarified, cases to be walked through, and sources to be situated. That gives the episodes a seminar-room rhythm, but not a closed one. Listeners hear how scholarship is assembled: through fragments, comparisons, institutional records, awkward survivals, and careful claims about what the evidence can bear. For those drawn to British studies as a field of archives rather than nostalgia, the show offers unusually direct access to the making of historical argument.
Made for: For readers, students, researchers, and historically curious listeners who want long-form conversations with scholars about recent books. It especially suits people who enjoy careful context, archival examples, and arguments that take time to unfold.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its disciplined attention to the book as a piece of research: what it asks, what evidence it uses, and what larger history follows from it. Instead of quick author promotion, episodes often work like guided readings of a scholarly argument.
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/british-studies
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Author interviews reveal how historians turn military records, correspondence, audience research, and political ideas into sustained arguments about Britain's past.
New Books in British Studies turns author interviews into working sessions on how historical arguments are built. Conversations move from wartime political economy and Normandy operations to Huguenot correspondence, antisemitism in European football culture, and racism in…
Huguenot couriers and racist TV audiences: your historical curiosity gets a wide reading list.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear look at faith, secrecy, and the danger built into carrying messages.
The episode is strongest when it treats Huguenot politics as a question of trust and movement. Letters had to travel safely, couriers were exposed, and ordinary correspondence could turn into proof, leverage, or danger.
Football clubs, Jewish memory, and antisemitic naming are traced through Vienna, Munich, and fan culture's long reach.
This review treats football clubs as sites of history rather than simple sport, moving between Bayern Munich's Qatar sponsorship fight and FK Austria Vienna's identification as a "Jew club".
Audience research opens a darker television archive, where popularity and racism remain hard to untangle.
This episode approaches television history through the traces left by audience research, asking what those records can show about racist pleasures, assumptions, desires, and reactions that other archives often soften or miss.
A clear look at how a maneuver division fares when the fight turns into attrition.
Arthur W. Gullachsen offers a focused operational reading of The Defeat and Attrition of the 12th SS-Panzerdivision Hitlerjugend, framing the division as a formation built for maneuver that was instead pulled into an attrition fight.
A careful case for how predictive control keeps shaping debate even when human beings do not behave predictably.
Mark Pennington's conversation with Morteza Hadizadeh keeps returning to Foucault, liberal political economy, and the question of how modern authority imagines people.
A thoughtful, patient conversation on rivers as living beings and where conservation language falls short.
Robert McFarlane's Is a River Alive? considers what shifts when a river or forest is treated as a living being, not as scenery or resource. Speaking with Darius Dziplinskas, McFarlane moves from his years as a climber and Mountains of the Mind to the Sarayaku people's account of…
A careful argument linking labor theory, Bernstein, the First World War, and the aesthetic roots of modern political language.
Duncan Kelly's New Books Network appearance makes a strong case for politics as a problem of value, tracing the line from labor theory and the marginalist critique to the argument that modern politics has aesthetic roots as well.
Great books, taken chapter by chapter, with delight
Book talk with room to wander.
Ryan Tripp interviews Duncan Kelly about his book 'Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics'.
Darius Dziplinskas interviews Robert Macfarlane about his book 'Is a River Alive?', exploring humanity's relationship with rivers through global case studies.
This episode features an interview with author Alex Powell about their book 'Queering UK Refugee Law: Sexual Diversity and Asylum Administration', exploring LGBTQ+ issues in UK asylum processes.
This episode features an interview with historian Stuart Carroll about his book 'Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe', exploring historical conflicts and social dynamics in that period.
Jeremy Harte, president of the Folklore Society, tells Jana Byers that people who really found hoards did so accidentally, while the legends come from pub storytellers and "secret diggers" whose holes mark roughly a third to a half of barrows.
Adam Rovner's biography follows Nathaniel Isaacs from Canterbury and St.
Elspeth Curry speaks with Penny Roberts about Huguenot networks, truth, and secrecy in early modern history.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
This episode features an interview with Professor Donald Sassoon discussing his new book 'Revolutions: A New History' and its historical insights.
This episode features an interview with Professor Rory Naismith about his book 'Offa: King of the Mercians', discussing historical scholarship on this medieval ruler.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
Kim Embrey traces coca’s transformation in Britain from its 1835 appearance in a botanical journal to the 1912 Hague Convention’s drug restrictions.
The host speaks with the guest about The Making of "Jew Clubs": Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures, a 2025 Indiana University Press book.
Christine Grandy tells Dave that Race on Screen is a history of 'not knowing racism' in twentieth-century Britain, built from BBC and ITV archives alongside film broadcasts.
Dr.
Gullachsen discusses his book on the 12th SS Panzer Division in Normandy.
Professor Mark Pennington speaks with Morteza Hadizadeh about his most recent book published with Oxford University Press on Foucault and liberal political economy, tracing questions of power, knowledge, and freedom with a steady eye on what those ideas do in practice.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
This episode features an interview with Dr.