New Books in Art

Interviews with Scholars of Art about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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Episodes

Katie Beswick, "Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture" (Routledge, 2025)

How are working class women represented in contemporary culture? In Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture (Routledge, 2025), Katie Beswick, a Senior Lecturer in Arts Management at Goldsmiths, University of London, examines this question by analysing the figure of the ‘slag’ across a range of cultural forms, including theatre and television. Alongside a history of the idea of the ‘slag’, the book draws on deep case studies of key artists, including Tracey Emin, Cash Carraw...

May 31, 2025•43 min

Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith, "Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter" (MIT Press, 2025)

Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, how did people secure their private letters? The answer is letterlocking—the ingenious process of securing a letter using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, or adhesives such as sealing wax, so that it becomes its own envelope. This almost entirely forgotten practice, used by historical figures ranging from Elizabeth I and her spies to Japanese samurai lords, was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social ...

May 27, 2025•46 min

Jaleh Mansoor, "Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory" (Duke UP, 2025)

Join me for conversation with Dr. Jaleh Mansoor (Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia) about her book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory (Duke University Press, 2025). Our discussion brought us to topics like the artists’ muse, the modern laborer, and other figures precariously suspended between the object/subject dialectic. In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, D...

May 22, 2025•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 171

Andrew Griebeler, "Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past. Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated m...

May 12, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 46

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