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The claim to moderate or modernist Islam in Indonesia is particularly contentious today, as these labels participate in the global politics of identity for Muslims past and present. Who gets to claim to be representative of an Islam that is modernist, progressive, or tolerant? What constitutes a traditionalist Islamic orientation? And why and for whom do these distinctions matter? In her new book Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia (U California Press, 2026), Dr. Verena Meyer raises these questions in an ethnographic study of two major Indonesian Muslim organizations based in Yogyakarta: the Muhammadiyya and the Nahdlatul Ulama. 

Within a larger global discourse of Muslim belonging, and in particular anxieties about the growth of so-called radical and intolerant Islam, the labels given to these organizations (traditionalist and modernist) take on new importance. It is the question of categories—what defines them, what work they do, and how they change—that Meyer investigates through interviews with organization members, study of intellectual and genealogical traditions, and observations of institutional building within the groups. Engaging the field of memory studies and critical debates about the role of remembering and commemorating the past through history and heritage, Meyer argues that the terms and connotations of categories like modernist and traditional have shifted as Indonesian Muslims recall their formative pasts in ways that involve, and not preclude, ambiguity and contradiction. As such the book participates in debates within Islamic studies about the role of paradox and contradiction in Muslim historical and theological frameworks, constructed within temporal shifts in agency and power.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program.

Dr. Verena Meyer is Assistant Professor of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University (NL). 

Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). 

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Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down sex discrimination, Dorothy Kenyon drew the legal blueprint. Justice Was Her Calling: The Fierce and Fascinating Life of Dorothy Kenyon (U California Press, 2026) by Jennifer Brinkley is the first full-length biography of the New York judge, lawyer, and civil liberties champion whose litigation strategies helped transform the Equal Protection Clause into a powerful tool for women’s rights. Across decades, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal and into the rise of second-wave feminism, Dorothy Kenyon stood at the forefront of reform.

A longtime ACLU national board member, the only woman appointed by the League of Nations to study women’s legal status worldwide, and a US delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Kenyon pushed equality onto the global stage long before it was widely embraced. Her career was nearly undone when Senator Joseph McCarthy named her first on his list of alleged communists, a spurious accusation that cast a lasting shadow.

Drawing on letters, speeches, and fresh archival research, Brinkley restores Kenyon to her rightful status as a legal pioneer and reminds us that civil liberties endure only when defended.

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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Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Susanne Yuk-Ping Choi examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people. 

Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Dr. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate sexual possibilities opened up by marketization and digitalization while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and gender norms. The book demonstrates that younger Chinese people’s efforts to resist traditional obligations and pursue nonnormative life projects are relational, partial, and intersectional, shaped through encounters with changing configurations of power and inequality at the intersection of global forces and local histories.

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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How AI is rewiring our social fabric—and how we can better shape our future.
 
The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It's embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we are, what we can do, and where we belong.
 
In Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life (U California Press, 2026), Mona Sloane offers a pragmatic framework for understanding these transformations around prediction, classification, and linearity, proposing that we think about AI as a social arrangement that we coproduce. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and real-world examples, this book invites us to see AI for what it is: deeply social, deeply political, and open to change. Clear-eyed and provocative, Predicted is a call to reclaim deliberations about progress and innovation as a public good and to ensure that the futures we chart are the ones we choose—together.

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