New Books in Urban Studies

Molly Brookfield’s book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) explores
the historical, legal, and cultural history of street harassment in the
United States. Historically, Brookfield identified the "masher panic"
(late 19th–early 20th century) when reformers and municipalities labeled
male accosting of women a public problem and enacted anti-masher
ordinances or applied disorderly-conduct laws. On law and policy, the
book highlights primarily local legal responses against harassment, with
municipal codes and reinterpretations of existing ordinances more
common than coherent federal action that criminalizes mashing.

In Watching the Girls Go By,
street harassment is situated on a continuum with other gendered and
sexualized violence, with the argument that street harassment normalizes
and underpins more extreme harms against women. The book portrays
historical scholarly perspectives to street harassment including those
of Cheryl Bernard and Edith Schlaffler. Also, the book builds on diverse
historical sources and employs varying terms for similar behaviors. The
author uses "intrusive behaviors" as a more precise analytic category
while preserving period-specific terms when discussing particular
historical contexts.

Mariam Olugbodi
is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the
monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches
Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag.
Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible
to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge
platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain
inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a
teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through
her social links: LinkedIn, ORCID, Meta.
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In 1644 four norcini
or pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their
fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it
with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their
shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this
supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome
themselves, who had become so obsessed with meat that they turned a
blind eye to
such horrendous acts. This fabricated story points to an underlying
reality—that in the early seventeenth century, a series of popes
dramatically increased the amount of food and wine consumed by Romans,
culminating in a per capita consumption of over a pound of meat per day
during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (d. 1644).

The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) traces the efforts and
activities of a range of actors who strove to bring meat to the Roman
table. Dr. Bradford A. Bouley shows how Rome’s preoccupation with food
was the result of papal policy in the aftermath of the Reformation;
food, and especially meat, served as religious and political propaganda,
symbolizing the correctness of the Catholic faith and demonstrating the
extent of papal power. Dr. Bouley details the dramatic reorganization
of Roman foodways needed to satisfy this demand for meat, as large herds
of animals had to be funneled from the countryside to the city. This
consumption was ultimately not sustainable, triggering a crisis that
fueled sensational rumors
of murder and cannibalism and eventually, Dr. Bouley contends, sparked
the outbreak of civil war, as vassals rebelled against papal oversight. The Barberini Butchers
recovers this significant episode in food, environmental, and cultural
history, one that brings early modern politics and history into
conversation with concerns over human use of natural resources and
consumption of animal products that continue to resonate clearly today.

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

For early San Franciscans, seafood was an important source of
nutrition and a feature of social life, inspiring culinary developments
that remain components in California cuisine more than a century later.
Consumers interested in flavorful alternatives to meat and associated
health benefits could follow recipes for nearly fifty types of marine
life from state waters, such as salmon, flounder, and oysters. Others
are no longer available, out-of-vogue, or simply forgotten. Further,
overfishing and environmental damage decimated many local seafood
stocks, providing a cautionary tale with global significance.

In San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table (Bloomsbury,
2026), Dr. Paul Stangl traces the development of San Francisco's
fisheries, seafood markets, cookery, and dining culture from the Gold
Rush to the 1920s. Migrants from around the world imported fishing
techniques and cuisines, then slowly adapted as they came to understand
local resources and each other. Newcomers found the tastiest fish
through trial and error and assimilated the “best” into a new cuisine.
Different ethnic and occupational groups collaborated, fought, and
learned from one another as they irreversibly altered the natural world
around them. By the end of the First World War, San Francisco's seafood
cuisine scarcely resembled that of the 1850s, due to cultural
adaptation, technological advancements, and changes to the natural
environment. It was no longer derivative of New England and France, but
included influences from the Southern states, Asia, and South America.San Francisco Seafood
chronicles the city's transformation from a fish-barren town-where
restaurants served canned, pickled, and dried fish from the East
Coast-to a seafood-rich metropolis that harvested seafood from Mexico to
Alaska. He emphasizes how the impacts on nature and local labor serve
as a necessary cautionary tale for today's global seafood trade. This is
a thorough and insightful history of a once emerging, and now
essential, cuisine for food and history buffs alike.

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

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data
(University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through
this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global
computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological
development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an
ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and
marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes
the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform
capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote
regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers
that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with
compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses,
Dr. Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the
growing economies of data extraction.

Breaking
down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes
visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird
today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of
the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban
space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.

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

In
the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England
between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society.
In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers
the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed,
and sustained their defenses, bridges, streets, water systems, and harbors.

Dr.
Magnusson reveals how even modest communities, like the Warwickshire
town of Atherstone, boldly pursued projects that reshaped their futures.
Grants of tolls and taxes funded paving initiatives, bridge repairs,
and fortified walls, while enterprising lords and abbots sponsored
sluices, conduits, and quays. These efforts were not confined to
England's great cities; small towns with limited means also sought
to enhance their competitive edge, even when such investments strained
their resources. Drawing on royal records, municipal archives, and
archaeological evidence, Dr. Magnusson situates these civic undertakings
in their broader social and environmental contexts. She shows how
townsmen adapted traditional obligations of labor
and charity alongside innovative fiscal tools to sustain projects that
could span generations. Yet the balance was fragile. The crises of the
fourteenth century—famine, plague, and the harsher climate of the Little
Ice Age—undermined local resources, leaving many communities to
struggle with maintenance or watch their infrastructures decline.

At
once a history of engineering, economy, and community, this study
illuminates how medieval people conceived of security, health, and
prosperity through the material fabric of their towns. By tracing the
rise, transformation, and survival of these infrastructures, Dr.
Magnusson demonstrates how urban communities navigated centuries of
change while shaping the very landscapes in which they lived.

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