Randal Maurice Jelks, "My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy" (Broadleaf Books, 2026)

In this episode of the New Books Network, Željko Stanojević speaks with Matthew Montgomery about his article “An Intercessor Like Moses: A Key Component of the Psalter’s Message”, published in the European Hebrew Journal.Montgomery’s study asks how the final form of the Masoretic Psalter communicates hope after the collapse of Judah and the Babylonian exile. Building on the widely recognized observation that Book III of the Psalter engages the downfall of the Southern Kingdom while Book IV places unusual emphasis on Moses, he traces textual signals connecting these sections with Exodus 32–34. Particular attention is given to the introduction of Moses and Aaron, the clustering of references to them in Books IV and V, and repeated allusions to Moses’ intercession after Israel’s covenant-breaking at Sinai.The central argument is that these features are not isolated reminiscences. Read together, they help shape the Psalter’s theological and literary message. Moses appears as the paradigmatic representative who can stand between God and a disobedient people, plead on their behalf, and turn away divine anger. Montgomery argues that, in the post-exilic horizon of the Psalter, this Mosaic pattern contributes to an emerging hope for an intercessory figure capable of mediating between God and a covenant-breaking community. The interview explores what this proposal contributes to final-form readings of the Psalter and why the arrangement of psalms can itself become a vehicle of meaning.Matthew Montgomery is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose research includes Psalms, scriptural reuse, rhetoric, literary coherence, and the shaping of biblical collections. His article was published on 18 June 2026 after double-blind peer review, with Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. Eckart Otto serving as Academic Editor. The article is freely available through its permanent DOI.Montgomery will also speak at the EHJ International Scholarly Online Conference 2026, “New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies”. On 8 November 2026 at 22:00 CET, he will present “Neither Story or Arbitrary: The Rhetoric of Juxtaposition in the MT Psalter”. The presentation develops a related concern with how the Psalter’s ordering creates rhetorical and theological effects without requiring readers to treat the collection either as one continuous story or as an arbitrary anthology.The host, Željko Stanojević, is a Hebrew linguist, biblical philologist, lexicographer, translator, and scholar of Biblical and Modern Hebrew. He is President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Hebrew Journal, and a host on the New Books Network Biblical Studies channel. His work includes Biblical Hebrew, Semitic linguistics, textual criticism, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Bible translation, biblical onomastics, and Hebrew lexicography.This episode will be of interest to readers and listeners working on Psalms, the Hebrew Bible, Moses and Aaron, Exodus traditions, intercession, post-exilic theology, ancient Hebrew, biblical allusion, textual criticism, and the literary shaping of Scripture. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife of James’s nephew, the Dutch William III of Orange. Devoted to her husband, Mary would not accept the crown alone, and so William and Mary were crowned together, securing a smooth dynastic succession. The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada (Princeton UP, 2026) recounts the forgotten campaign that carried William and his army to English shores and led directly to James’s fall, bringing a revolutionary age vividly to life—and rewriting the history of Britain, Europe and the transatlantic world more widely.In this bold work of revisionist history, Dr. Arthur der Weduwen tells the momentous story of the Dutch Armada, describing the immense risks and near failures of the last seaborne invasion of England—which occurred exactly one hundred years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The sixteen thousand Dutch troops who accompanied William were not on hand for moral support. They came with sword, musket and cannon. Dr. der Weduwen argues that the political revolution in Britain could not have been achieved without the willpower, might and resources of William and the Dutch nation, and explains why the Dutch Republic, a small state that celebrated peace and commerce above all else, would dare to undertake a reckless preemptive military strike on its more powerful neighbour.Transforming our understanding of the Glorious Revolution and Britain’s ascendancy as a global powerhouse, The Last Invasion of England relies entirely on contemporary sources, many from leading protagonists who prepared and executed the invasion, evoking the historical realities of the women and men who lived during turbulent and uncertain times.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We are in a state of crisis. Democracy is under threat, authoritarian politics are on the rise, and digital media—once heralded as emancipatory technologies—are increasingly implicated in democratic erosion. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a critical framework for understanding the entangled relationships between discourse, digital media, and the hidden dynamics behind antagonism and polarisation.The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces (Routledge, 2025) presents a fluid social ontology that theorises how discourses and digital communication technologies are inseparably entangled, and how this entanglement contributes to the formation of complex hierarchical relations. Drawing on discourse theory and new materialist perspectives, Dehghan maps how the various components of the discursive-digital link—users, collectives, identities, the medium’s design, underlying neoliberal capitalist logics, and structural power dynamics—together shape antagonistic frontiers in digital spaces. Through detailed case studies across multiple digital media, Dehghan demonstrates how these entanglements manifest through different articulatory logics that could transform societies towards either agonistic progress or disastrous polarisation.By revealing the logics of discursive-digital alliances and active passivity, Dehghan provides critical insights for academics, activists, and anyone seeking to foster progressive togetherness. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a powerful theoretical framework and methodology for analysing digitally mediated communication. It challenges monolithic understandings of polarisation, technological solutionism, and symptom-focused approaches, instead advocating for radical structural interventions across all entangled components of the discursive-digital link—a necessary shift in both academic research and progressive political strategy to address the democratic crises of our time.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Tainted Tools: New Materialisms As a Decolonial Project (Manchester University Press, 2026), Angela Last offers a provocative intervention into the tense relationship between new materialist and decolonial thought. Although both seek to challenge dominant European categories and hierarchies, they are often treated as incompatible. New materialisms, in particular, have been criticised for sustaining a white, universalised vision of the human and overlooking the racialised histories embedded in the "nonhuman." aThe book traces these tensions to an earlier encounter between new materialist and decolonial projects forged through experimental combinations of Marx and Nietzsche. Once used to counter fascism, Stalinism and colonialism, this politically charged fusion gradually became depoliticised, leaving unresolved contradictions. Rather than reviving these early formations, the book brings their strategies into dialogue with contemporary new materialist and decolonial approaches to build greater theoretical solidarity in times of crisis.Angela Last is a cultural geographer working at the intersection of postcolonial and science studies.   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Celebrated poet, essayist, playwright, and American artist Langston Hughes is one of the few American writers who consistently wrote about democracy from a joyous perspective, and My America explores how his work speaks to the political anxieties and crises we face today. Randal M. Jelks deftly examines the themes in Hughes’s work, including creative expression, communal dignity, class struggle, and human suffering, and what they mean for our inner well-being as democratic persons and political participants.With care and no-holds-barred insight, My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy (Broadleaf Books, 2026) removes the veneer of respectability often placed on Hughes’s work and life to reveal his political adeptness. In a world threatened by fascism, Hughes’s writing wasn’t afforded the luxury of subtlety. He made a spiritual and political decision to stand on the side of the oppressed. He believed art should be practiced for the sake of justice. And democracy can be practiced with joy.Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks is an award-winning author, documentary film producer, and professor. He is the author of four books. His writings have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, blogs, journals, and periodicals. You can learn more about him and his work at his website.Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In June 1968, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan B. Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy, marking yet another killing in a decade haunted by political violence. As he was being subdued, Sirhan shouted, “I can explain. I did it for my country,” by which he meant Palestine. On trial, he testified that his motives included opposition to Zionism, with particular anger directed toward Kennedy because of the senator’s call for arms sales to Israel. Despite Sirhan’s confessions, the significance of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the slaying largely escaped notice—or was actively obscured.I Did It for My Country: Sirhan Sirhan, Palestine, and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy is a revelatory account of Sirhan and the political dimensions of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. It illuminates Sirhan’s Palestinian background, war-torn childhood, and experience of displacement, considering to what extent trauma contributed to his mental health problems. Michael R. Fischbach uncovers how prominent actors—from the United States and Middle Eastern governments to Jewish and Arab American groups—deliberately depoliticized the assassination by downplaying Sirhan’s grievances about American support for Israel. He also examines why US authorities investigated possible Arab co-conspirators and explores how Palestinians understood Sirhan’s action, as well as how Sirhan has maintained his Palestinian nationalism during his decades in prison. Drawing on in-depth archival research—including FBI and CIA documents—this book pinpoints a missed opportunity to consider how US foreign policy could affect domestic security. Michael R. Fischbach is professor of history at Randolph-Macon College. His books include The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (2019); Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (2018); and Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2003).Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

WWII in East Timor: An Australian Army Site and Travel Guide (2/2 Commando Association of Australia, 2024) is an overdue addition to the history of a campaign that remains surprisingly little known in Australia, despite its significance to Australia’s part in the war. Working district by district – from Dili south to Aileu, Ainaro and Manufahi, west to Liquiçá, Ermera, Bobonaro, Cova Lima and Oecusse, and east to Manatuto, Baucau, Viqueque and Lautem – this book offers a fresh, site-based perspective on the Second World War in East Timor (Timor-Leste).The book’s starting point is the “Gazetteer of Towns and Villages in Portuguese Timor”, compiled in 1943 by the Allied Geographical Section. With meticulous precision, Willis revisits these sites and adds GPS coordinates, maps, wartime photographs by Sergeant Keith Davis, contemporary photographs taken at the same locations, and paintings by Australian war artist Charles Bush. These are supplemented with accounts from the Australian War Memorial and National Archives, Trove, unit and campaign histories, Timorese testimony, and new material from sources in Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and Tetum. In doing so, it brings together diverse sources – archival, oral and site-based – that have not previously been assembled in one place.Following these sites, the book traces the arrival of Sparrow Force on the island of Timor in December 1941 and the landing five days later of a combined Australian and Dutch detachment in neutral Portuguese territory at Dili, through to the Japanese assault of 20 February 1942 and the guerrilla campaign that followed. It also covers sites relevant to the two and a half years of occupation after the January 1943 Allied withdrawal, including the extensive Japanese defensive infrastructure built using Timorese forced labour, famine, executions, Allied bombing of towns and villages, and the role of the covert Services Reconnaissance Department operations.The book is targeted toward Australian defence and diplomatic personnel posted to Timor-Leste, professional military education and staff, and veterans, descendants and travellers who want to locate the places where battles were fought and ambushes laid. It makes an important contribution to Timor-Leste’s potential as a heritage tourism destination, with the economic benefits such a sector brings. Above all, it serves to acknowledge the Timorese people whose support made the Australian campaign possible, and the landscapes on which this shared history is written.The book can be purchased from the 2/2 Commando Association of Australia.Edward Willis is a committee member of the 2/2 Commando Association of Australia and a former Deputy University Librarian at Curtin University. His father, William Edward (Bill) Willis, served with the Signals Section of the No. 2 Australian Independent Company on Portuguese Timor in 1942. He has been travelling to Timor-Leste to survey wartime sites since 2008, and prepared this guide with the support of a grant from the Australian Army History Unit.This episode is hosted by Dr Natali Pearson. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It seems likely that most listeners to this podcast channel have heard of “shell shock,” the old name for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (usually abbreviated as PTSD). Even today, the long-term effects of combat tend to be under-estimated, but that was much more true in the years following World War I, when the diagnosis of “shell shock” first appeared. Terri Lewis’s When They Came Home (Miami UP, 2026) tackles this problem head-on. Based on the lives of the author’s grandparents, this beautifully written, compassionate novella follows the war experiences and long-term effects of combat on not only the soldiers themselves but their families, forced to confront what to them often appears incomprehensible behavior that affects their loved ones’ ability to function in the post-war world. The story focuses on Milton Fieth, a twenty-one-year-old farmer from Kansas who, like the other young men on his train, enlists out of a sense of duty to his country, hope of glory, and a free trip to France. The reality of the trenches horrifies him, and the loss of cherished comrades leaves him with massive survivor guilt for which he has no name. A year later, he’s back home, where he meets a young woman named Edith whom he courts and eventually marries. Only as the years turn into decades do both Milton and Edith realize that the scars left by those few horrific months will never heal completely. Terri Lewis, a former ballerina, won the Miami University Press 2025 Novella award for When They Came Home. Her debut novel, Behold the Bird in Flight, appeared in 2025. Her interests lie with historical fiction—not dates or wars but untold stories of daily lives, particularly forgotten women. Find out more about her and her books at here. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her latest book, Song of the Silk Weaver, appeared in September 2026. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kentucky, 1798: A harrowing series of murders begins. The first body, discovered by cattle drovers, lies bloody at the bottom of a ridge. Then another—a dead boy staring up from a sinkhole. Bodies turn up along roadsides, stuffed into brush. They float to the surface of muddy brooks. For nine terrifying months, over hundreds of miles of Kentucky and Tennessee countryside, the terror unfolds. The killers—two men with hazy backgrounds—are brothers, named Wiley and Micajah Harp.The Harps killed dozens, but why they did it has eluded folklorists and historians for generations. Almost every story imagines that their motive was pure bloodlust, but for historian Katherine Grandjean, that’s too simple. Instead, she uses the Harp murders to reveal the dark side of the young United States’ independence. These were uncertain and dangerous years—a time when the fledgling federal government could do little to protect its citizens. And if the American Revolution was liberating, it was also deeply destabilizing, politically and socially. Even as it built up some men, it stacked the deck against others, punishing them with volatile markets, lost safety nets, and shattered aspirations. Unspooling the mystery of what sent the Harps reeling exposes the hidden, violent legacies of the revolutionary era.Bristling with tense, page-turning storytelling—and driven by a historian’s obsessive detective work—Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution (Random House, 2026) recovers these long-forgotten murders as a haunting tale about the darkness at the heart of the American dream.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Ar: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy (ARC Humanities Press, 2026) represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew ReviewGlenn Peers is Emeritus Professor, Art History at University of Texas Austin and Syracuse UniversityMichael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.