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New Books in Art

Marshall Poe

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.

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  • 38 episodes
  • Avg 55 min
  • English
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • #1430
    Yesterday · 54 min

    Somaesthetic Design with Michael Arnold Mages and Stephen Neely (Transcript Publishing, 2026)

    Over the past twenty-five years, design practice has expanded from making objects to shaping experiences that unfold in-time. As this expansion has accelerated, designers have gained powerful new tools – but often without a shared language for shaping embodied experience. Somaesthetic Design: The Experiencing Body and the Dynamics of Time responds by focusing on the experiencing body as a key source of design knowledge.

  • #1428
    November 1 · 42 min

    Art for the White House: A Changing Portrait of America with Leslie Greene Bowman (White House Association, 2026)

    With Art for the White House: A Changing Portrait of America (White House Association, 2026), Leslie Greene Bowman presents a wholly new perspective on the White House fine arts collection, revealing how all two-hundred and fifty years of America’s history can be told through the collection. Art for the White House begins with the story of how the collection was created—slowly and cautiously—as our young nation was eager to distinguish itself from artwork that could be associated with the patro

  • #1427
    October 31 · 1 hr 15 min

    Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic with Irina Shevelenko (Cornell UP, 2024)

    Irina Shevelenko's Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic (Cornell University Press, 2024) discusses the late-19th and early 20th century search for an archaic Russian folk tradition that could ground Russian art in an idiom independent of “The West.” While the [re]discovery of 14th and 15th century icon painting partially achieved this goal, Russian Modernists most often ended up creating art that was entirely new and which owed little to Russian folk tradition; t

  • #1426
    October 23 · 1 hr 6 min

    Art for War: Heritage Looting, Blood Antiquities, and the International Fight Against Terrorism Financing with Costanza Musu (Stanford UP, 2026)

    Understanding the world of art—particularly antiquities and archaeological artifacts—requires tracing how objects are removed from the ground, displaced by conflict or economic hardship, and ultimately reappear in the international art market. The odyssey of an artifact from its excavation site to an auction house, a private collection, or a museum display case raises a host of pressing concerns about the fragility of cultural heritage but also the global mechanisms that sustain its circulation.

  • #1425
    October 21 · 1 hr 15 min

    Neil Selkirk on Why Photographs?

    When Neil Selkirk first saw one of Arbus’s photographs as a young man at someone’s house in London, it almost sent him screaming into the street. Unsettled and shaken, the encounter instead opened his eyes to the uncanny powers of photography. It turned Selkirk into an important photographer and, ultimately, an indispensable collaborator to some of the greatest photographers of all time, including Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and other greats. In our conversation on great photographers and the a

  • #1424
    October 15 · 42 min

    The Kennicott Bible: A Masterpiece of Jewish Book Art with Katrin Kogman-Appel (Bodleian Library, 2023)

    Katrin Kogman-Appel is a professor of Medieval Jewish history with research focusing on book culture, readers, and reading practices in medieval Europe and beyond. In The Kennicott Bible: A Masterpiece of Jewish Book Art (Bodleian Library, 2023) she discusses the text of the 24 canonized books of the Bible that is paired with David Kimchi's grammatical treatise “Sefer Miklol”. Katrin discussed the Kennecott Bible, a medieval Hebrew manuscript that contains unique illustrations and Masoretic text

  • #1423
    October 12 · 34 min

    "The humanities should really matter to STEM disciplines" with Yasmín Hernández and Baruch Vergara

    This is the first episode in a series that explores the intersections of science and the humanities in university life. In today’s conversation, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is joined by artists Yasmín Hernández and Baruch Vergara for a discussion about Herlihy-Mera's article “The humanities should really matter to STEM disciplines.” They explore the relationship that art and the humanities have with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and consider why that relationship matters more than e

  • #1422
    October 10 · 40 min

    Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism with Julia Bailey (U Illinois Press, 2026)

    The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset that pitted the USSR’s state-sponsored Socialist Realism against its so-called opposite: Western art in general and Abstract Expressionism in particular. But can one version of art be the opposite of another?

  • #1421
    September 27 · 49 min

    The Connoisseur: A Cultural History with Peter Burke (Reaktion, 2026)

    Eminent historian Peter Burke joins Jana Byars to discuss his new book, The Connoisseur: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2026), considering the art connoisseur from the Renaissance to the present day. Connoisseurs have been an influential, if somewhat mysterious, figure in the history of art, responsible for making or breaking high-profile collections and reputations and influencing taste, the art market, and the field of art history with their pronouncements. But what did it take to become a conn

  • #1420
    September 21 · 1 hr 38 min

    Glenn Peers, "Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Art: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy" (ARC Humanities Press, 2026)

    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

  • #1419
    September 20 · 1 hr 11 min

    Joe Jackson, "Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic: Music, Modernity, Transmedia Art" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

    Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generat

  • #1063
    September 11 · 39 min

    Marjolijn Bol, "The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100–1500" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

    Panel painters in both the middle ages and the fifteenth century created works that evoke the luster of precious stones, the sheen of polished gold and silver, and the colorful radiance of stained glass. Yet their approaches to rendering these materials were markedly different. In The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100–1500 (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Marjolijn Bol explores some of the reasons behind this radical transformation by telling the history of the two oil painting

  • #1062
    September 9 · 1 hr 1 min

    Leonhard Emmerling, "The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus" (Seagull Books, 2026)

    In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society. In this interview, Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Leonhard Emmerling about his book The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (Seagull Books, 2026) Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person

  • #1061
    September 1 · 29 min

    Duty, Banality, and Hopefulness with Alex Cain

    In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Alex Cain. Dr Alex Cain researches in the fields of political theory and ethical theory, with a particular focus on the work of Hannah Arendt, among other figures in the history of philosophy. Her work in this field has so far mostly focussed on the topics of friendship, political action, judgement and the role of experience in philosophical inquiry. They discuss Sidney Nolan’s duty to paint the concentration camps, the hopefulness of Hannah Arendt, and the i

  • #1060
    August 25 · 1 hr 10 min

    Transcending Disciplinary Confinements With(in) Beckett Studies

    This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network. In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-founder of the Replaying Communism project, which received funding from the AHRC SWW-DTP (2023) and the V

  • #1059
    August 14 · 58 min

    Ellery E. Foutch, "A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

    Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often categorize their subjects as being motivated by one of two opposing notions: a wholehearted embrace of progress or an antimodernist nostalgia. A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026) centers a different kind of response to the period’s newly intensified awareness of temporality and history: an obsession with preserving perfection. Engaging a diverse set of case studies, Dr. Ellery E. Fo

  • #1058
    August 5 · 38 min

    Sara Pappas, "Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

    Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2024) examines one of the most revered art historical narratives of Western art: the famous turning point for painting and sculpture usually emblematized by the works of Édouard Manet and then the Impressionists. Instead of the usual revaluation of this turning point, Sara Pappas argues for the importance of the failure to find a cohesive story for the art world in the period itself,

  • #1057
    August 2 · 49 min

    Paulina Banas, "Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century" (American University in Cairo Press, 2025)

    Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East. In her debut book, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Ce

  • #1056
    July 27 · 1 hr 6 min

    Meredith Gamer, "City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London" (Yale UP, 2026)

    City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London (Yale UP, 2026) uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London’s sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts – from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slang – it offers new readings of works by major artists, such as William Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, and Jo

Showing 1–20 of 38 episodes