New Books in Performing Arts

What is the place of poetry in the modern world? In Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia UP, 2025), Keegan Cook Finberg, an Associate Professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County narrates the contemporary history of poetry as the emergence of a public literary form. The book shows poets' engagement with social and economic changes, such as the rise of bureaucracy and office jobs, suburbanisation, feminism, and neoliberalism, alongside changes in literary forms and literary practices In doing so, the analysis demonstrates both the importance of poetry to reflect social and economic change, as well as its potential as a critical force in our moment of social and economic crisis. Ranging widely across individual poets, artistic collectives, and performance activities, the book will be of interest across the humanities, as well as anyone interested in why poetry matters today. 

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Brass bands have played a unique role in the cultural history of Britain. Amidst the industrial revolution, an increasingly urban population turned to music for mass entertainment. Brass bands became intimately associated with working men and spread across the country at breathtaking speed. At their height in the late Victorian era, there were thousands of them. 

In The Brass Band Story (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Trevor Herbert reveals the story of these bands, from their working-class origins and the enormous popularity of Victorian contests to their sophistication in modern times. It is a tale of the survival of tradition and the embrace of change. Victorian brass bands solidified communities and promoted shared local identities. As new modes of popular culture posed existential threats in the twentieth century, they reinvented themselves. The model British bands created is now replicated throughout the world. 

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.

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Through a postcolonial lens, Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere (Liverpool, 2025) explores the various ways in which francophone writers, visual artists and activists are responding to the global climate and environmental crises threatening the Earth today.The volume covers most of the francosphere: Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, South America and Polynesia. As well as discussing a range of environmental issues, from soil erosion to nuclear testing, it also considers ways in which francophone writers have become ecological activists. The ecotexts discussed include graphic novels, visual narratives, and zines alongside more conventional literary texts such as novels, short stories and poetry. The book seeks to decentre Belgium and France in francophone ecocritical scholarship while engaging in current debates in the field of ecocriticism, including the afterlives of Belgian and French colonialism and neo-colonialism in relation to climate change and environmental degradation, Blue Humanities, waste and toxicity studies, critical animal and plant studies, Indigenous peoples and their cultures and knowledges, climate-environmental (in)justice, and writerly/textual activism for climate and environment. It aims to widen the geographical scope of francophone ecocriticism by discussing a wide range of eco-themes that go beyond the segmentation and compartmentalisation found in other books in the field.

Guest Nsah Mala is a poet, writer, children’s author, consultant, editor and translator, journalist-communicator, futurist and foresight practitioner, and interdisciplinary scholar working in English, French and Mbesa. Nsah currently works for the University of Cologne, Germany, as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Hub Coordinator of the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition.His research interests include comparative literature, anglophone and francophone African literatures, public and environmental humanities, literary activism/artivism, creative writing and foresight and futures thinking. He has published widely in these areas in peer-reviewed volumes and journals, including Ecozon@, Orbis Litterarum, Electronic Green Journal, Humanities, Peripeti and ASAP/J. His ongoing projects on ‘Wetland Time’ and ‘Congo Basin Futures’ are funded by the British Academy and the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellowship, respectively. Among many distinctions, he has judged the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and won the Dubai Foresight Award in the Foresight for the Planet category.

Guest Richard Watts is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian Studies, co-creator of the Environments, Cultures and Values minor, and founding director of the Translation Studies Hub at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lexington Books, 2005) as well as a series of articles on the intersections of francophone postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. He is currently completing a book project titled Reclaimed Waters that considers how the pollution, privatization and manufactured scarcity of water are rapidly altering its ostensibly stable symbolic value in literature, cinema and other forms of cultural production in the Francosphere.

Guest Giulia Champion is a Lecturer in Critical Ocean Studies at the University of Southampton. Her main research project is being developed in a monograph entitled The Political Construction of the Seabed: A Political Ethnography of the International Seabed Authority. This project explores the diplomatic processes of the United Nations body of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) and the creation of a regulatory framework it is negotiating about deep-sea mining. The work explores this through a decolonial studies lens given the ISA’s location in Jamaica and its development of regulations about a new extractive frontier on the international seabed. Her work sits across the humanities and social sciences and uses arts-based methods for participatory public and policy engagement. She also collaborates on several projects including one on decarbonisation and electrical grids in Shetland, Orkney UK and Newfoundland, Canada; on Lithium extraction in Chile, and on safe swimming and access to green and blue spaces on the Isle of Wight, UK. She is an Associated Editor for the journal Environmental Humanities. She is the co-founder of the Deep Currents Collective, a group of activists and academics which holds a United Nation observer status at the International Seabed Authority. Her work has been published in (co-)authored articles in Bulletin of Latin American Research, The Journal of Energy History, Ocean and Society, Applied Energy, The Conversation, People and Nature and Comparative Law Journal of The Pacific.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.

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It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and the New York Times has published its list of the best 100 television shows of the 21st Century. We react to this list, ponder what is underrated, overrated, and completely snubbed, and question the value of grand lists in an age of micro-cultures.

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How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology—an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being refashioned in a variety of arts and media. Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (Brill, 2025)
explores a wide range of cultural experimentation, collectively termed “playing with plays:” the theatricality embedded in commentary, the poetic and visual imagination arising from drama illustrations, the interactions between reading and singing arias, the imbrication of reading plays and practicing religion, and the ludic act of writing playful essays on drama. Through engaging these disparate phenomena with media studies, the book advances a new model for thinking about drama history, and shows the entwinement of plays and different forms of media in shaping perception, molding experience, and enabling new subject positions to emerge in early modern China.

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