New Books in Higher Education

Today I’m speaking with Peter N. Miller, historian and president of the American Academy in Rome, about his new book, Research: A Manifesto (Princeton University Press, 2026). Globally, we spend around $3 trillion dollars a year on research, roughly 2% of global GDP. This activity is the source of many breakthroughs and innovations, not only in the sciences but in all domains of life. Without research, we wouldn’t have as detailed an understanding of past events or cures to once-deadly diseases. Research, however, is also a source of skepticism and suspicion. The activity conjures fears of viral lab leaks, misaligned artificial intelligence, deadly weapons of war, and wasting of taxpayer money. Research: A Manifesto presents a history of the idea and activity of research to demystify a process that despite being so prevalent is so little understood. Research is at the heart of our contemporary world, inextricably tied to the forces that drive society. Peter’s research on research is thus invaluable today.Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Designing Historical Games for Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Educators (Routledge, 2026) is a complete introductory guide for designing analog games and interactive choice‑based historical texts for history classes. It is designed to support educators who want to design games or who want to guide and assess student game‑making projects in history class.The chapters in this book lead the educator designer through a range of topics, including the core features of historical games, the educational power of using historical games to study history, and the role of playing and designing analog games and choice‑based texts in the classroom. It also shows how to design historical analog games (such as boardgames, card games, roleplaying games, and choice-based historical text games designed with Twine) using the Historical ProblemSpace Framework as a practical design guide to structure, teach, guide, manage, and assess student‑designed historical game projects, both analog games and choice‑based texts. This book provides sample plans, guidelines, and rubrics for fully implementing student‑designed historical game projects, and detailed examples throughout this text—from tabletop and choice‑based text games—provide practical help for teachers and students.This applied guidebook will be essential reading for pre‑service and in‑service teachers of Social Studies and History Education. It is a guide for any educator who is looking to design historical games for classroom learning or have their students engage in the critical learning of historical game design.Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since the early 1980s. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds three PhDs in game studies (LMU Munich, University of Passau & University of Vechta). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm HNU, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning in Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic (U Virginia Press, 2025), George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Working with Critical Realism: Stories of Methodological Encounters (Routledge, 2022) is an international and interdisciplinary collection that gathers stories from researchers and research students about their methodological encounters with critical realism. Whether the contributors are experienced or novice researchers, they are predominantly new to critical realism. For various reasons, as the contributors' detail, they have all been drawn to critical realism. It is well known that critical realism can be bewildering and even overwhelming to newcomers, especially to those unfamiliar with language of, and without a grounding in, philosophy. While there are now numerous and important introductory and applied critical realist texts that make critical realism more accessible to a broader audience, stories from newcomers have been absent - especially as part of a single collection. The significance and uniqueness of this collection lies in its documentation of first-hand reflective insights on the practical use and implementation of critical realism. The contributors feature critical realist inspired research journeys in Australia, England, Scotland, Belgium, Sweden, and Spain. The hope of this book is that the stories and accounts presented in it will inspire - or at least sufficiently arouse - the curiosity of others to explore critical realist possibilities, which we believe offer enormous value to serious researchers across and within all disciplines and subjects who are interested in rigorous intellectual work with a socially progressive purpose. Books and resources mentioned in the episodeCritical Realism Network —useful general hub with introductory materials, library, workshops, videos, interviews and links into the wider CR community, Roy Bhaskar, ed. Gary Hawke, The Order of Natural Necessity: A Kind of Introduction to Critical Realism Mervyn Hartwig, Up From Midnight: Fathoming the Depths of Reality with Ram Roy Bhaskar Andrew Collier, Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy Roy Bhaskar edited by Gary Hawke - The Order of Natural Necessity: A Kind of Introduction to Critical RealismGrant Banfield, Critical Realism for Marxist Sociology of Education Alpesh Maisuria, ed., Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What does it mean to learn when algorithms increasingly shape how knowledge is produced, organized, and interpreted? Editors Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, and Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román join Shreya Urvashi to talk about their book Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions (U Minnesota Press, 2026), a collection that examines how artificial intelligence and computational systems are changing education, cognition, and ideas of human intelligence. The editors discuss the complexities of algorithm, training data as curriculum, AI bias, and the concept of more-than-human learning. They also explore the relationship between contemporary technologies and colonial forms of reason, the limits of treating bias as a purely technical problem, and what happens to human agency as learning becomes increasingly entangled with algorithmic systems. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.