Pre-Reading

In this episode of High Theory, Milan Terlunen talks to Kim about Pre-Reading. There are many books we will never read and films we will never watch, but it turns out we know quite a bit about them in advance. A concept developed in his work on the plot twist, pre-reading names the epistemic practices by which we approach a text before we read it (if we ever do). The pre-reading environment is shared, social knowledge that shapes our expectations long before we open the cover or hit play. This podcast episode forms part of the pre-reading environment for Milan’s article, "What We Can(’t) Know Before We Read: Towards a Theory of the Pre-Reading Environment" (Book History 27, no. 2 (2024): 346-374). The article proposes the Pre-Reading Environment as a new object of study for understanding how texts relate to communal knowledge. While easily overlooked by scholars, equipped with fuller knowledge derived from their own reading, Pre-Reading Environments are among the most widespread epistemic objects in book history. Turning to two literary texts, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), the article examines how their respective Pre-Reading Environments, in newspapers and on Twitter, strategically concealed key plot points that might pre-emptively spoil the experience of potential readers. The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Milan Terlunen is a scholar of literature, with a focus on narrative and the history of reading practices. He works as a Researcher in Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex. While a PhD student at Columbia University he co-created and hosted two podcasts – How To Read and In Sacred Spaces – and co-founded the Humanities Podcast Network in 2021, where he met Kim and Saronik. He is also an editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Humanities Podcasting, a huge project that he ran along with Kim, Saronik, and Beth Kramer. A book about podcasting would not be complete without its own podcast. Keep your ears peeled for Podcasting the Humanities later this year. The image for this episode is an illustration from Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921), titled “Read Books on Practical Navigation.” It is a line drawing showing a reader swamped by piles of books. The image was found for High Theory by Lili Epstein on the Public Domain Image Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Food Chemistry in Small Bites takes readers on an up-close scientific journey through the transformation of food when meals are prepared. Organized in bite-size, digestible units, this innovative text introduces students to food's molecular makeup as well as the perception of food by the five senses. Using familiar foods as examples, it explores what happens to ingredients when heated, cooled, or treated and also considers what happens when materials that don't naturally mix are forced to do so. With informative, full-color renderings and a hands-on lab section, the book encourages students to think like scientists while preparing delicious dishes. Readers will formulate hypotheses as to why certain foods taste hot despite being at room temperature, why milk separates into curds and whey when lemon is added, and other ordinary but chemically complex phenomena. This book also importantly challenges readers to think critically about the future of food in the face of a warming planet. Patricia B. O'Hara is the Amanda and Lisa Cross Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biophysics at Amherst College, coauthor of The Chemical Story of Olive Oil, and author of numerous scholarly research publications. Melek Firat Altay is a trained musician and neurobiologist, currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What is that rock you’ve just picked up? Which minerals is it made of, what’s unique about it and what can it reveal about Earth’s deeper story?Rocks: A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell (Frances Lincoln, 2026) gives you the tools to answer these questions. Geologist and science illustrator Vojta Hybl guides you through more than 100 rock types, explaining how they form, what they look like and the geological processes they represent.This authoritative yet accessible guide includes clear explanations of igneous, volcaniclastic, sedimentary, metamorphic and anthropic rocks. It also discusses practical tips for spotting and identifying rocks, including detailed specimen illustrations that highlight key features for easy recognition. Alongside practical identification advice, Rocks invites you to see the ground beneath your feet in a new way, connecting everyday stones to billions of years of planetary change.Whether you’re a curious walker, an outdoor enthusiast or simply fascinated by the natural world, this book will transform how you experience landscapes and help you read the stories written in stone. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

n this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alison Gadsby about her collection of short fiction, Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026). Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, catastrophic speculative fiction, and psychological realism in a collection that might best be described as weird fiction. These connected stories offer dark reconstructions of lives brimming with desperate loneliness. They allow us to bear witness to the life-altering love of sisters, brothers, mothers... the life-altering love that buoys them as they struggle to stay afloat in the wake of childhoods they merely survived. Alison Gadsby writes in Tkaronto/Toronto where she lives in a multigenerational home that includes several dogs. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals, including Blank Spaces, The Temz Review, The Ex-Puritan, Blue Lake Review and more. She is the founder/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Derek Krueger Monastic Desires: Homoeroticism, Homophobia, and Love of God in Medieval Constantinople (Cambridge UP, 2026) The Byzantine Abbot Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) transgressed the homophobic norms of medieval Orthodox society. His longing for God was distinctly homoerotic, and he depicted union with the divine as a queer sort of marriage. His Orthodox theology of theosis, the deification of the entire person, meant that Symeon taught the salvation of all the parts of the body. But monks also desired the eradication of lust and the punishment of those who fell prey to it. Sermons and biblical commentary defined men who had sex with men as sodomites; and saints' lives warned of the consequences of same-sex desires. Those who renounced sex redirected their desire rather than eliminating it. Symeon's queer erotics shed light on other devotions distinctive to medieval Orthodoxy, including the veneration of saints and worship with icons. Monastic Desires makes a groundbreaking contribution to the history of sexuality and the history of Christianity. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Derek Krueger is emeritus professor of religious studies at UNC Greensboro, the author of multiple books including Liturgical Subjects: Biblical Narratives and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium, the editor of far more, and former editor of the book series Divinations: Rereading Late Antiquity. Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology at University of St. Gallen, talk to Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer in Digital Methods in the Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies department at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, about his book, _Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy_, as well as some of his other work. The book examines one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, Tor, the overlay network that allows for anonymous communication, best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. Collier takes a community-centered approach and examines the many different reasons and motivations people become involved in using and maintaining the platform. The trio also talk about various other projects and themes, including Collier’s current project on the visual and aesthetic standardization of public security infrastructure, like barriers and bollards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This episode features a conversation with Murali Shanmugavelan and Sareeta Amrute about how caste structures IT workspaces and communication infrastructures. We began with their reflections on how they came to scholarship and advocacy on caste. The rest of our discussion covered a range of topics including, the ideology of tech as immaterial and disembodied, the role of tech within racial and caste supremacist projects, how and why large language models systematically favor dominant caste norms, the internal and external pressures required for tech companies to advance social equity, the necessity and limits of law in advancing protections against caste hate speech and other forms of identity-based violence and discrimination, and the need to balance visibility and secrecy as two dimensions of the anticaste struggle. Guest bios: Murali Shanmugavelan: Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute and Senior Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Sareeta Amrute: Associate Professor of Strategic Design at Parsons School of Design, Affiliate Faculty of Anthropology at the New School, and Principal Researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute. References: Karve: Dhondo Keshav Karve set up a home and school for widows in the city of Pune in Maharashtra in 1896. The institution, which is now called Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Samstha, runs 60 sites for women's education. Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement. Western Ghats: a mountain range that stretches along the western coast of the Indian peninsula. Sriram Krishnan: tech executive and Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in the second Trump administration. Bruno Latour: French philosopher known for his work in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Maha Shivarathri: annual festival to celebrate the deity, Shiva. Mimi Onuoha: Nigerian American visual artist and academic whose work examines the effect of data collection and technology on society. Thenmozhi Soundararajan: founder of the Dalit feminist organization Equality Labs and author The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition. The Hindu Code Bills aimed to codify and modernize Hindu personal laws, promoting gender equality in marriage, inheritance, and adoption. Gail Omvedt: sociologist and anticaste activist whose work on Dalit epistemology and politics was path-defining. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom by Mark Pennington This highly original and innovative book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. Divided into two parts the book commences by demonstrating important commonalities between Foucault's ideas and those of a neglected 'post-modern' stream in liberal political and economic thought. These ideas draw on a social theory emphasising a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science highly critical of socio-economic 'scientism' and 'expert rule'; and an understanding of freedom as an open-ended process of 'self-creation' in the face of cultural power relations—a freedom threatened by alignments between state power and more decentred manifestations of power.Part two combines the tools of Foucault's critical social theory with those of a post-modern liberalism to problematise four separate though overlapping 'bio-political' or 'pastoral' dispositifs in contemporary liberal societies focused on social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and law and order. Where the Foucauldian and the post-modern liberal approaches suggest that freedom requires a cultural and economic 'creative destruction' that destabilises existing modes of thought and ways of being, the pastoral dispositifs that seek to 'monitor and correct' multiple pattern anomalies are shown to stifle the space for that creative freedom.Though the book does not engage the question of whether Foucault himself moved towards endorsing liberal political economy, it throws considerable light on how key Foucauldian concerns may be addressed within the liberal tradition, and why Foucauldians may have reason to embrace a reconstituted or post-modern liberalism Mark Pennington has been Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King's College, University of London, since 2012, and is currently Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society. Prior to King's he taught for twelve years in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He has a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. 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. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region's changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands' early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands' history for scholars and nonspecialists alike. Gregory Smits is professor of history and Asian Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Early Ryukyuan History: A New Model. Ran Zwigenberg is a professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

For many Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Christmastime sparks memories of egg rolls and General Tso's chicken. How did the affinity for Chinese food amongst many Jews begin? Trace this delicious history from the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to today’s take-out lo mein with Andrew Coe, author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. This lecture originally took place on December 22, 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network