New Books in Folklore

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and
sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change—floods, land loss and shifting shorelines—carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. With clarity and insight, it also brings to life the tellers and collectors of these stories, tracing how oral knowledge endured even as literacy spread. A compelling invitation to listen again to old stories, and to hear what the land and sea remember.

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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The
early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia.
The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution,
and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance
expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage
lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State
(Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Michelle Bigenho and Dr. Henry
Stobart unpacks the myriad motivations for heritage making in this this
politically transformative moment. Heritage Fever reorients
UNESCO-driven heritage debates towards a different set of questions—a pivot the authors call “heritage otherwise.”

These
inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and
engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and
Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate
aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities.
Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of
scale within the country's new political autonomies, even as old-style
nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights
imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing
historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades.

Privileging
the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically
involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever's
research draws from the authors' combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the
last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and
ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in
heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical
heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever
looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on
archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and
knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a
decolonizing state.

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. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies (University of South Carolina Press, 2026) counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant of the past. Across eight interdisciplinary essays, the book’s contributors trace an arc, described in time and space, from pre-Middle Passage Africa through the Caribbean and coastal United States into the interior South and beyond. They consider how Gullah-Geechee cultural traditions are simultaneously rooted in the physical Lowcountry homeland and represent a dynamic cultural ethos that is not bounded by geography and has shaped Black life across North America and the Caribbean Basin. Together, these essays reveal the resilience and adaptability of people whose history defies myths of isolation and immobility. Gullah-Geechee Diasporas is a fresh framework for understanding African American cultural origins, migrations, and transformations.

Dr. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim is associate professor of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel. He is the author of America’s Other Muslims and Gullah Geechee Muslims in America. You can find him on Instagram and LinkedIn.Dr. Elizabeth J. West is professor of English and the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. Her books include Finding Francis and African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction. She can be found online at Instagram and LinkedIn.

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Names are incredibly powerful things and are a crucial part of the way we see and classify the world around us. Plant names are especially fascinating in this respect. Some are simply descriptive or speak of ancient uses and remedies, whilst others have religious origins or roots in wider folklore, and some are very recent inventions.

Scottish Plant Names: An A–Z (Birlinn, 2026) by Dr. Gregory Kenicer introduces almost 300 plant names to showcase the enormous variety of Scotland’s native species. It includes English, Gaelic and Scots (Including dialect) names, revealing the country’s diverse linguistic history. Short descriptions, together with historical and cultural information in each entry, make this book an ideal companion for all those with an interest in Scotland’s rich botanical tradition.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

During a robbery on 10 March 1844, 14-year-old servant Mary Doherty was murdered in a farmhouse near Culdaff, Co. Donegal. There was no doubt locally about the perpetrator’s identity, but there was insufficient evidence against Daniel McKeeny, and he was eventually transported for a separate offence of sheep-stealing. Based on original research, Finding Mary: The untold story of an Inishowen murder, 1844 (Four Courts Press, 2025) by Dr. Angela Byrne reconstructs the world of a north Donegal village on the eve of the Great Famine to explore the approaches to justice taken by the local community and agents of the state, and examines the survival of the murder in local folklore to reflect on memory, remembrance and whose stories get to be told.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore