New Books in Communications Podcast
1) Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)
Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent...Show More
2) Ann Komaromi, "Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the emergence and development of samizdat, a significant and distinctive phenomenon of the late Soviet era that provided an uncensore...Show More
3) Betto van Waarden, "Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
How did politicians deal with mass communication in a rapidly changing society? And how did the performance of public politics both help and hinder democratization? In Politicians and Mass Media in th...Show More
4) Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Q...Show More
5) Sonia Hazard, "Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford UP, 2025) offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spr...Show More
6) Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)
Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tunis to Salonica, Jerus...Show More
7) Rachel Midura, "Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP, 2025) connects and situates histories of the post ...Show More
8) Pluribus Episodes 8 & 9 Analysis: It’s Over!
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we continue our analysis of Pluribus, with our thoughts on episode 8, “Charm Offensive” and episode 9, “La Chico o El Mundo.” Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...Show More
9) Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora, "Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Screening Precarity integrates a cultural analysis of film texts and history, industry transformations, and the violence and crises of political economy infrastructures, to study post-liberalization s...Show More
10) Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)
Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society. Scholars of science,...Show More