New Books Network

Manuela Ceballos’ new book Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2025) engages with the life and legacies of two sixteenth-century saints; the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús (also known as Teresa of Avila) and the Moroccan Sufi Sidi Ridwan al-Januwi. The book draws from rich Arabic and Spanish sources that moves us between Morocco and Iberia. In the process, we learn that these saints both descent from families of converts and as such blood and bodily pollution operated as material and metaphoric symbols to define their identities. Through this generative comparison, we see how constructions of blood and dung circulate across these varied but entangled temporal geographies to constitute notions of impurity and purity, such as in the case of the deathly hemorrhaging experienced by Teresa. In end though blood is used to set different boundaries around religious or racial identities, and even at times gender norms. As such, the discourses that are utilized for such argumentations are not stable, and so blood and how it is deployed is not the same across the stories of these two saints and their enduring legacies nor does it refract power consistently. This book will be of interest to those who think about embodiment, material culture, the early modern Mediterranean world, and Christian-Muslim mysticism.

Manuela Ceballos is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at [email protected].
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"Roman theatre" is a term often used to describe the theatre of ancient Italy during the second and third century BCE. Plautus and Terence are referred to as ‘Roman playwrights,’ and Rome itself is generally regarded as the driving force behind the development of theatrical culture in Italy. But was this early theatre in Italy specifically or characteristically Roman? Using previously marginalised archaeological source material and placing it in constructive dialogue with the surviving ancient literature, A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre (Liverpool UP, 2025) offers a significant reinterpretation of how theatre developed in the Italian peninsula, as well as a radical reappraisal of the role of Republican Rome as the impetus for cultural change. Challenging a long-held scholarly consensus, it is argued that whilst Rome would eventually rise to political and cultural dominance, the archaeological evidence does not encourage us to view Rome as a significant factor in the development of theatre in Italy until at least the end of the first century BCE and the construction of the Theatre of Pompey. Our attention is directed instead to other cities in the Italian peninsula during the third and second centuries BCE, which have hitherto been greatly overshadowed by imperialistic narratives of Roman cultural development.

Jessica Clarke is a historian and archaeologist specialising in ancient Roman theatre and entertainment culture. She was awarded her PhD by University College London in 2024.

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: here
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The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters (Harvard UP, 2026) is a groundbreaking history of political struggle in the Spanish New World, where commoners and elites alike challenged the social order through the remarkable power of paperwork.

As Spanish conquistadors swept through the New World, the Crown envisioned that a rigidly hierarchical aristocratic order would flourish in their wake. At first, this vision seemed to be within reach: the great conquistadors ruled as noblemen over millions. Yet contrary to all expectations, the Spanish empire in the New World quickly became a hotbed of radical efforts to overturn the emerging order. With the conquistadors in retreat, new enclaves controlled by powerful friars and native lords arose. But they too collapsed, again to the surprise of many.
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The YIVO Institute was pleased to present a special evening with acclaimed novelist Philip Roth. Roth read excerpts from his new novel, Nemesis (2010), which tells the story of a terrifying polio epidemic raging in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944 and its devastating effect on the closely knit, family-oriented community and its children. Through this story, Roth addresses profound questions of human existence: What types of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand circumstance?

Preceding the reading was a panel discussion with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent, Bernard Avishai (Hebrew University), Igor Webb (Adelphi University) and Steven Zipperstein (Stanford University).

This reading and discussion originally took place on May 18, 2011.
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This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.

In this second panel of the day, Ellen Horne moderates a conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika, Barry Lam, and Julia Barton, three veterans who have made a specialty of working on creative, idea-informed series.

Professor Ellen Horne directs the Podcasting and Audio Reportage concentration at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She was the executive producer and editor of Admissible: Shreds of Evidence, and was host, reporter, and producer for Luminary’s Lies We Tell. Horne was the executive producer of WNYC’s Radiolab, where she won George Foster Peabody Awards, Third Coast Awards, and the Kavli Science Journalism Award. Her new documentary, Age of Audio, tells the story of the podcast from birth to boom to today.

NYU Professor Chenjerai Kumanyika specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. His podcast Empire City was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best podcasts of 2024. He was the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, a podcast on the Civil War, and he is the collaborator for Scene on Radio’s Season 2 “Seeing White,” and Season 4 on the history of American democracy.

Professor Barry Lam earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton, taught at Vassar, and recently moved to UC Riverside. He is the host and executive producer of Hi-Phi Nation, a story-driven podcast about philosophy, at Slate magazine. He is also an Associate Director of the Marc Sanders Foundation, which promotes excellence in philosophy and public philosophy.

Julia Barton is an award-winning podcast, audiobook, and radio editor. She was the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, where she helped develop Revisionist History and Against the Rules. She’s the editor of Malcolm Gladwell’s audiobook The Bomber Mafia, Michael Specter’s Fauci, and Michael Lewis’s unabridged Liar’s Poker and companion podcast. Her 2019 series, Spacebridge, was called “dazzling” by The New Yorker. She is the author of the audio history newsletter, Continuous Wave.
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