Liz William, "Rough Music: Folk Customs, Transgression and Alternative Britain" (Reaktion, 2025)

Liz William, "Rough Music: Folk Customs, Tran...

Up next

Olivia Rodrigo Blends Past and Present in Her New Album

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and today we react to Olivia Rodrigo's new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. We analyze the lyrics and the aesthetics of the album, including the notable influence of The Cure and 80s British New Wave in particular. We offer an app ...  Show more

James O'Leary, "The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

The premiere of Oklahoma! in 1943 is commonly called a “turning point” in the history of the Broadway musical. Often characterized as the first integrated musical―meaning that the songs and other elements of the show are integrated into the story―James O’Leary offers a different ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Adele Oliver, "Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill" (404 Ink, 2023)
New Books in Caribbean Studies

Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill (404 Ink, 2023) by Adèle Oliver shines a critical light on UK drill and its fraught relationship with the British legal system. Intervening on current discourse steeped in anti-Blackness and moral panic, this Inkling ...  Show more

Elizabeth I & the Sultan of Morocco
Not Just the Tudors

Elizabeth I and Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco shared a common goal of empire building, despite their cultural, political and religious differences. Their alliance resulted in the transformation of sugar from a luxury item to a widespread commodity and their little-known co ...

  Show more

Africans in 17th Century England
Not Just the Tudors

In the 1640s, Black communities existed in London and in most of England's port cities, communities from which men would fight and die throughout the English Civil War. There's still little evidence of the lives of these individuals. So what do we know of the Black men who too ...

  Show more

Close Readings: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
The LRB Podcast

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair', is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, ye ...  Show more