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In the mid-twentieth century, researchers at an experiment station in Sonora's Yaqui Valley designed high-yielding wheat seeds with the promise that increasing crop productivity would end world hunger. The seeds made their way across the world, where accompanying inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation systems transformed global farming in what came to be known as the Green Revolution.  

In The World in a Wheat Field: Mexico, Science, and the Challenge of Ending Global Hunger (U California Press, 2026), Dr. Gabriela Soto Laveaga challenges this history—often told from the point of view of philanthropic organizations, development proselytizers, or heroic American scientists—by placing native lands, Sonoran farmers, Mexican innovation, and Mexico-India connections at the center. Presenting groundbreaking archival research, The World in a Wheat Field sheds new light on how global initiatives changed a local place and points to why so many development projects failed to eradicate hunger worldwide. 

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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In this Episode, current Editor of 19th-Century Music  and the outgoing Editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society offer an inside look into publishing shorter research articles under the rubric “Object Lessons” which take an innovative approach to extending the study of music beyond score and performance to objects involved in the creation and reception of music. They discuss how this genre of scholarly writing as well as its materials and methods may contribute to a disciplinary intervention, 

Nineteenth-Century Music  and the Journal of the American Musicological Society are published three times a year by the University of California Press. For more information about the journals, including subscription and submission information, please visit the NCM and JAMS websites. If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation.

To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit here. 

Articles mentioned: 

1. “Touching Music, Making Musicology” JAMS Vol. 79 (2026) Issue Supplement 
2. Object Lesson: Samsung/Schubert NCM 49.1 (2025)
3. Object Lesson: Four-Hand Nietzsche NCM 49.2  (2025)
4. Object Lesson: Mel Bonis’s Hand NCM 49.3 (2026)
5. Object Lesson: Chopin’s Last Pleyel Piano NCM 50.1  (2026)

Hosted by Berthold Hoeckner in conversation with Jake Johnson 

Berthold Hoeckner is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music at the University of Notre Dame and Professor Emeritus of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Jake Johnson serves as Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Musicology at the Wanda L. Bass School of Music

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How has policing fundamentally shaped the Latinx experience? The history of Latinx groups in the United States has been marked, from the beginning, by experiences of criminalization and violence at the hands of law enforcement. Marisol LeBrón argues that policing has left an indelible mark on Latinx communities across the country and has come to shape our understanding of what it means to be Latinx. Spanning the nineteenth century to the present, Policed: A Latinx History of State Violence (U California Press, 2027) examines how policing became a key component in the formation of Latinx identity and political consciousness, and still lies at the heart of many pressing issues confronting Latinx communities today, including immigration, employment, health, and housing. More than simply telling a story of police brutality and harassment, Marisol LeBrón powerfully shows that Latinx people have continually resisted state violence and worked to build a more liberated future.

In this conversation, we discuss the violent formation of the border, the criminalization of Latinx youth, the surveillance of Latinx political activism, and the diversity schemes of twenty-first century police forces. Marisol LeBrón's Policed is a timely and powerful synthesis of the policing of Latinx peoples in the United States.

Dr. Marisol LeBrón is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. LeBrón is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on race, social inequality, policing, violence, and protest.

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What revolutionary disability politics look like today, with lessons for larger liberatory movements. In recent political times, disability identity has been mobilized in ways that paradoxically compound bodily injury and disability. This single-issue approach obscures the oppression of disabled people and prevents solidarity across difference. In Disability, Revolution (U California Press, 2026), Robert McRuer introduces alternatives to "one-dimensional disability," providing an accessible overview of disability justice movements and their relevance to larger emancipatory coalitions. Exploring the most prominent examples from the past several decades, the book focuses on the convergence of queer and crip movements, mad pride, intersectional disability justice work, neurodiversity, and the globalization of disability alliances. Essential for anyone interested in disability politics, this book shows how these multivalent movements help us imagine alternative disabled worlds. A transcript of this episode is available here.

Robert McRuer is a writer and speaker whose work is situated at the intersections of the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory. His award-winning 2006 book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability has been translated into three languages. He is a Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and critical theory more generally.

Clayton Jarrard is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer working at the nexus of queer and trans studies, disability and mad studies, and religious studies.

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