New Books in Geography

Apr 13 2025 564 ep. 54 mins 1.6k
New Books in Geography Podcast artwork

Interviews with Geographers about their New Books

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The Dead Sea: A 10,000 Year History

Apr 13 2025 40 mins  
Geographic labels are sometimes misnomers. The Dead Sea’s name is not, for the most part. Its high salinity levels kill most forms of life, barring a couple hardy microbes and algae—and even these are threatened by environmental change. Except the Dead Sea has been part of human history for millennia. Jericho, the world’s oldest city, sits nearby. It features prominently in t

Azmeary Ferdoush, "Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Mar 29 2025 82 mins  
The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host state territories in 2015. Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border (Cambridge UP, 2024) focuses on the protracted territorial exchange and experiences of the newly accepted Bangladeshi cit

V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Mar 24 2025 64 mins  
Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots ins

Royce Kurmelovs, "Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil" (U Queensland Press, 2024)

Mar 23 2025 34 mins  
A riveting expose of the global oil industry' s multi-decade conspiracy to muddy the waters around the science of climate change and use the Australian government to undermine worldwide efforts to address environmental devastation. Researched and written by one of Australia' s most fearless investigative journalists, Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil (U Queensland

Genevieve Guenther, "The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mar 19 2025 30 mins  
The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) offers readers new ways to talk about the climate crisis that will help get fossil fuels out of our economy and save our planet. It's an analysis of the current discourse of American climate politics, but also a critical history of the terms that most directly influence the way not just conservatives but centrists on both sides of

Maggie M. Cao, "Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mar 15 2025 42 mins  
Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century. In this work, art historian Dr. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity with and resistance to ascendant US imperia

Joseph A. Seeley, "Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Mar 14 2025 61 mins  
Icy, unpredictable, and treacherous, the dangers of the Yalu River were heightened in the twentieth century when it became the longest non-maritime border of the Japanese Empire. Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan’s Empire in Korea and Manchuria (Cornell University Press, 2024) focuses on this river at this critical juncture, analyzing how imperial Japan attempted

Martin Spychal, "Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act" (U London Press, 2024)

Mar 12 2025 52 mins  
The 1832 Reform Act was a landmark moment in the development of modern British politics. By overhauling the country’s ancient representative system, the legislation reshaped constitutional arrangements at Westminster, reinvigorated political relationships between the center and the provinces, and established the political structures and precedents that both shaped and hindered Br

Luis F. Alvarez Leon, "The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism" (U California Press, 2024)

Mar 08 2025 52 mins  
Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalis

Gary Griggs, "California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State" (U California Press, 2024)

Mar 07 2025 69 mins  
California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns and regions frequently contend with destruction caused by earthquakes, floods, landslides and debris flows, and sea-level rise and coastal erosion. As Dr. Gary Griggs demonstrates in California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster Histo