This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one.

The serial is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative—from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books—seriality names the spread of installment-based storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic structure. Seriality—in its dependence on gaps, delay, and constraint—names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is often difficult to see and difficult to bear.

Through formal readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the dialectical method of G.W.F. Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2026) shifts the focus of seriality studies. In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have become endlessly fragmented. Rather, Engley finds, we have become radically—serially—connected.

Ryan Engley is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA, where he teaches and researches the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and media studies. Along with Todd McGowan, Engley co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).

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What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for?

In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027).

For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of acceleration: producing more stories, for more platforms, with fewer resources. AI promises even greater efficiency, but is doing more with less really what journalism needs?

Lewis, Zamith, and Dodds argue that the current AI moment offers something more consequential: an opportunity to reimagine journalism itself. The conversation explores what remains distinctly human about journalism when machines can increasingly perform creative and cognitive tasks; how dependence on AI companies and digital infrastructure is reshaping media power; what AI means for journalism education and human judgement; and whether journalism can harness these technologies in ways that strengthen, rather than erode, its democratic purpose.

The conversation also raises a more fundamental question: is preserving journalism as an institution the goal, or should we rethink how society meets its information needs altogether?

Journalism in the Age of AI is available open access. Learn more and access the book here.

About the authors

Seth C. Lewis is the inaugural Elcan Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Previously, he was the founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media and Director of Journalism at the University of Oregon. In his research, Lewis examines the social implications of emerging technologies and their consequences for news and public life.

Rodrigo Zamith is an Associate Professor and former Chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of journalism and technology, with a focus on understanding the social implications of emerging technologies for how news is produced, distributed, and consumed. He is a recipient of UMass’ Distinguished Teaching Award.

Tomás Dodds is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Director of its Public Tech Media Lab. His research examines the evolving relationship between journalism and technology, with a focus on how journalists and media organizations can develop open-source tools and artificial intelligence systems that serve the public interest.

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Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.
This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors, malign media moguls, hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport, and authors and journalists who chronicled the turmoil of their time, their every word molded into metal type by what some viewed as a thinking machine. This revolution in media technology helped to propel Mark Twain into literary celebrity, but it also cost him his fortune – as well as his sense of humor and optimism.
The era of the Linotype was a bridge between Twain's Gilded Age with its tycoons of steam, steel, and wire and today's Gilded Age with its barons of bits and AI. Its history provides an opportunity to reflect on how technology changes culture just as new technologies – the internet and artificial intelligence –manufacture their endless streams of words today.

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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Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Vincent Haddad investigates how the franchise has maintained huge global demand despite its formulaic plotlines. Examining its exhaustive repetition of storytelling forms across comics, TV series, games, and merchandise, Haddad argues that the convergence of play, fandom, and narrative made Dragon Ball an unlikely success—and a harbinger of broader shifts in the media landscape of franchises from the 1980s to the present.

Dr. Haddad conceives of Dragon Ball as a “franchise toy,” a corporate media property that is constantly remixed by its fans in ways that its owners resist but also ultimately embrace: appropriation is essential to the franchise’s popularity. Over the past forty years, Dr. Haddad argues, Dragon Ball’s deployment of familiar tropes, cultural references, and narrative forms—from classical Chinese stories and the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to American franchises like Superman and Star Wars—has invited unique transcultural play. Through diverse examples of how fans use its characters as “playthings,” Dr. Haddad shows how Dragon Ball travels across international networked fandoms, highlighting the queer, gendered, and racialized dimensions of this play.

Parsing the dynamics of “sites of conflict” between authorized media and fan content, Next Time on Dragon Ball illuminates how fan engagement across the Americas changes the parameters of what a manga and anime franchise is and can be.

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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Media Matters in Landscape Architecture (Applied Research & Design, 2025) goes behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged in recent decades are shaping the practices of artists, designers, engineers, and scientists. The media infrastructure of climate science and Earth remote sensing, coupled with the increased availability of spatial information and modeling software, provides the context for many of the chapters in that the media and methods employed are designed to capture phenomena that are not directly visible to human perception, and where there is a high degree of uncertainty or changeability due to dynamic material conditions. Co-editors Karen M'Closkey and Keith VanDerSys bring together authors from a wide range of disciplines—landscape architecture, media studies, science and technology studies, history of science, engineering, ecology, and architecture—to examine how the creation and use of data, images, and models act as the mediums through which a particular understanding of “environment” or “landscape” arises. This framing of environmental media emphasizes the relationships among various design media and the specific material and social environments within which they operate.

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The centerpiece of Melodrama as Provocateur (Duke UP, 2026) is an essay by Linda Williams (1946–2025). Williams was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her highly influential work reframed some of cinema’s most neglected or denigrated genres from a feminist perspective, including documentary, pornography, horror, and melodrama.

Melodrama is the focus of what would become Williams’s final project. In the last few years of her life, she was working on a project that traced melodrama’s divergent fortunes in France and the US—and argued for its enduring relevance in contemporary life and culture.

Williams's work on this project was curtailed when she suffered a stroke, the complications of which led to her death in 2025. In the wake of her passing, some of her friends, collaborators, and admirers joined together to make a book that honors and memorializes her. Not only sharing Williams’s unfinished work with the world, Melodrama as Provocateur also expands on that work through a series of essays by scholars working in melodrama studies across time, place, and media.

For New Books in Film, Alix Beeston sits down with the three editors of Melodrama as Provocateur: Christine Gledhill, an esteemed scholar of film and feminism who is presently a Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Leeds; Laura Horak, Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University; and Elisabeth R. Anker, Professor of American Studies and Political Science and Director of Film Studies at the George Washington University.

Celebrating the model of incisive and generous research, teaching, mentorship, and collaboration Williams provided, the editors of Melodrama as Provocateur discuss the unique shape of a scholarly book generated in response to a colleague’s unfinished labor. They also take up some of Williams's provocations, including the political possibilities of melodrama in contemporary culture—from Trumpian discourse to trans cinema and beyond—and explore the kinds of labor, thought, and feeling necessary for studying melodrama as a form that moves or provokes us.

Like their book, a work forged in grief and loss, Gledhill, Horak, and Anker's conversation casts film and media scholarship as an act of collectivity and love: a bid for a better kind of world.

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In The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette (Oxford UP, 2026), the first ever published on The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), Caryl Flinn and Dana Polan examine the significance of this classic US sitcom within popular culture and within American society at the time. Child acting sensation Patty Duke plays the all-American Patty as well as her staid British counterpart Cathy, who comes to live with Patty's family in Brooklyn. Far from being a frivolous show, the show's use of twin girls--and their comic antics--offers glimpses into different identities and possibilities to try on, in keeping not only with girls' popular culture of the time but the optimism of John F. Kennedy's Camelot years.
At the same time, the series plugged into many of the contradictions of the mid-1960s. It flirted, as much of the US did, with foreign cultures, such as Julia Child's mediation of Frenchness, only to return to and reaffirm core US values. Like Kennedy, who encouraged the country's youth to engage with the world at large, the show gestures towards a cosmopolitanism that, ultimately, retreats into an American-based perspective, as evidenced in the series' preferential treatment of Patty over Cathy--despite the two characters being played by one actor.
Drawing on archival research, Flinn and Polan bring to light the show's production background, which has until now been largely lost to history, as well as considering the series's conception, reception, its many tie-in products, and its ongoing afterlife in the decades since its initial broadcast. In so doing, they reveal hidden and overt issues that shaped American culture and ideology of the 1960s.

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For centuries, many of the world’s most influential thinkers relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying. In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship (Princeton UP, 2026) introduces readers to these unsung scribes, assistants, and collaborators, showing how the scholarly enterprise is rarely as solitary as we tend to think. Dr. Blair traces how the learned have relied on helpers since antiquity, discussing how and when these amanuenses became visible in manuscript and occasionally in print and explaining why they were uniquely positioned to shape the posthumous legacy of their principal.

Taking an in-depth look at the later Renaissance, she reconstructs the private lives and academic pursuits of leading figures from the period such as the renowned humanist Erasmus, the reformer Martin Bucer, and Paris professors Adrien Turnèbe and Petrus Ramus. Dr. Blair paints multifaceted portraits of the servants, students, and family members who assisted in their work, drawing on sources ranging from scholarly texts in both draft and published forms to correspondence, annotations, biographical accounts, and household rules. Panoramic in scope, In the Scholar’s Workshop challenges conventional views about authorship and attribution while affirming the enduring importance of collaboration in scholarly work today.

Guest: Dr. Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her books include Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age and (with Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton) Information: A Short History.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

• Once Upon A Tome
• The World She Edited
• Monsters in the Archives
• Your Art Will Save Your Life
• The Artists Joy
• Becoming The Writer You Already Are
• The Other Side of the Desk
• Reflection in Motion
• Working with Academic Librarians
• Archival Etiquette
• The AI Mirror

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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The Ethics of Argumentation (Routledge, 2025) offers a new approach to the theory of argumentation that conceptualizes argumentation as a fundamentally ethical activity whose norms are grounded in, and must be selected according to, moral reasons. Current normative approaches to argumentation do not treat ethics as an integral part of argumentation theory. This is at least in part due to a methodological commitment not to address internal states of the arguers, such as intentions and beliefs, which makes moral theorizing about argumentation difficult. This book presents three arguments for why ethics ought to be a central element in normative theorizing about argumentation. First, it shows that ethics is needed for providing normative argumentation theory with its foundation and for offering arguers reliable guidance for decision-making both about which norms ought to govern their arguing and how they should shape each argument they make. Second, it addresses some of the most persistent problems faced by currently dominant normative approaches to argumentation, most notably that they are only reliable under the assumption that unrealistic background conditions are fulfilled. Finally, it provides the groundwork for a systematic ethics of argumentation. It does so by showing how a function of argumentation can be justified via moral reasons and by providing the outlines for both an applied ethics of (meta-level) normative argument design and an applied role-ethics of object-level arguing. The Ethics of Argumentation (Routledge, 2025) is essential reading for researchers and graduate students in a wide range of disciplines-including philosophy, communication studies, linguistics, and rhetoric-who are interested in argumentation, critical thinking and social epistemology"

Katharina Stevens is a philosopher and argumentation theorist working at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. She is one of the editors of the journal Informal Logic and one of the directors of the Critical Thinking and Citizen Engagement Lab at the University of Lethbridge.

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Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932 (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades, with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that these environments were as constitutive of the Corporation’s identity as the programmes and people that they housed. Borrowing from the architectural writer Christopher Hussey’s characterisation of Broadcasting House as a ‘palace of the ether’ Dr. Darling asks how the immaterial medium of the broadcast was given material and spatial form by the BBC, and the engineers, architects and designers whom they commissioned.

The book traces the development of the BBC both technologically and organisationally, and the changing demands it had of the spaces which accommodated it. It shows how associational networks and personal affiliations affected who was commissioned to work on what became Broadcasting House and offers a detailed account of the work of Val Myer, who designed the exterior and shell of the new building, and the team of architects who designed the studio interiors (Serge Chermayeff, Wells Coates, Edward Maufe, Raymond McGrath and Dorothy Warren). In documenting the design of Broadcasting House, and the responses to it, Palace of the Ether offers new insights into British architectural culture at a pivotal moment in the profession’s history.

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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Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times (Bloomsbury, 2025) describes tacit knowledge, what it is, how it used and its role in our current data driven world. Author James Cortada argues that fuzzy, hard-to describe information is greater and more, important than just hard facts. What is tacit knowledge? It is what we might consider knowledge that is unable to be fully communicated; knowledge that we understand implicitly, but it is a bit hard to explain. For example, it is the kind of knowledge one needs to ride a bicycle, but that cannot be described precisely on paper in the way one might be able to explain how to cook a dish. Tacit knowledge is the least understood type of information and one of the most difficult to communicate. Yet there is more tacit knowledge in our lives than the specific facts one can find in a book, on the Internet or in the simple form of a fact. This book is designed to introduce the reader to the concept of tacit knowledge and how to recognize and use it. This book offers definitions of tacit knowledge and compares the topic to explicit knowledge, then describes how the former is used today. The author argues that both types are used today and explains how one can use both types of knowledge in their lives. This book is essential primer to understanding tacit knowledge and learning how to use it to your advantage. 

Guest: James (Jim) Cortada is a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota. He is a leading authority on the role of modern information. He holds a PhD in modern history but worked at IBM Corporation for nearly 40 years in sales and consulting. He has written several books on the business history of the computer industry and just over a dozen on the history and use of information over the past two centuries. So, he straddles the subject between historical evolution and its current uses.  

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. 

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