New Books

Several of the books mentioned below are featured in our 2026 International Book Blitz. Check out the video on our YouTube channel.

2026 International Book Blitz video

People as Protection: Civilians Countering Terror in Northeast Nigeria

By Daniel E. Agbiboa

People as Protection is a groundbreaking exploration of the complex and underappreciated role of civilian self-defense groups in northeastern Nigeria during the Boko Haram insurgency, particularly the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF). Emerging in 2013, the CJTF was a grassroots initiative led by civilian populations, especially youth, to protect their communities from Boko Haram terror and the brutality of military forces. Caught between insurgents and the state, young volunteers patrolled their neighborhoods and risked their lives to prevent attacks while working alongside security forces many considered complicit in civilian harm.

Faculty Associate Daniel E. Agbiboa is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World

By Bruno Carvalho

Book cover for The Invention of the Future

For the past three centuries, urban dwellers and planners have imagined future cities that would be radically different from those of the past. Planners pursued progress, whether focused on flying vehicles above, sewage systems below, or daily life in between. Yet, as Bruno Carvalho shows in this original and wide-ranging history, which features some sixty illustrations, modern cities continuously defied predictions. Visionary designs and technological innovations created dramatic, unforeseen outcomes, and the ongoing urban boom is a story of continuity as well as rupture. A compelling history of imagined futures and the transformation of urban life, The Invention of the Future also suggests what we might learn from the stories of our cities as we shape them for the twenty-first century.

Faculty Associate Bruno Carvalho is a professor of romance languages and literatures and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.

My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art

By Alejandro de la Fuente and Cary Aileen García Yero

In late eighteenth-century Havana, residents frequently referred to the existence of large communities of negros and pardos as 'officers in the trade of painter' and the authors of 'exquisite works.' But who are these artists, and where can we find their works? What sort of works did they produce? Where were they trained, and how did they master their crafts with such perfection? By centering the artistic production and social worlds of artists of African descent in Cuba since the colonial period, this revisionist history of Cuban art provides compelling answers to these questions. Carefully researched and cogently argued, the book explores the gendered racial biases that have informed the constitution of the Cuban art canon; exposes how the ideologues of the slave owning planter class institutionalized the association between 'fine arts' and key attributes of whiteness; and examines how this association continues to shape art historical narratives in Cuba.

Faculty Associate Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin-American History and Economics and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Weatherhead alum Cary Aileen García Yero received her PhD from the Department of History at Harvard University.

Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland

By Cristina Florea

Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book, Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.

Weatherhead alum Cristina Florea is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University.

Public History in Japan: Theory and Practice

Coedited by Andrew Gordon

This book explores how public history, a field developing globally, is gaining attention in Japan and being incorporated into existing Japanese academic studies and practices. Public history in Japan is conducted through an interdisciplinary approach, involving not only history but also folklore, sociology, cultural studies, and tourism studies.

Introducing the perspective of public history means more than just applying an imported discipline to Japan; it involves a broad reconsideration of existing scholarly research and practices. Part I of the book provides an overview of the current state of academia in Japan as described above. Part II presents several case studies of public history practices, digital public history, and museums and archives dealing with difficult aspects of the past such as minority issues and environmental pollution in postwar Japan.

Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy

Coauthored by Taeku Lee

Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee draw on a decade of research on policymaking and public opinion to show us how scandals can ignite a public with few political outlets for their discontent. Scandals don't simply dominate news cycles: they can provoke us to demand better policy, spurring governments to adopt rules that protect us from massive corporations run amok.

Today it is giant companies, not governments, who run the world. They launch rockets into space, control satellite communication and develop era-defining AI technologies. But around the globe, these corporate titans are facing increasing public hostility.

The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism

By Durba Mitra

Beginning in the 1970s, women of the decolonizing world offered new visions of liberation that centered the ideas and lives of women. Galvanized by International Women’s Year in 1975 and the UN’s Decade of Women, Third World women developed novel ideas of equality and self-determination, building a new internationalism in opposition to neocolonialism and postcolonial authoritarianism. In The Future That Was, feminist historian Durba Mitra offers a pathbreaking account of how these women wrote Third World feminism into being, catalyzing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that transformed emancipatory politics across the globe.

Faculty Associate Durba Mitra is the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.

Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life

By Gabrielle Oliveira

Who gets to live a life with dignity? Each day, families around the world make the difficult decision to leave their homes in search of safety, stability, and opportunity. For many migrant families, this search centers on access to strong, caring, and equitable educational systems that enable children to flourish. Now We Are Here follows the lives of 16 migrant families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as they navigate the promises and challenges of the American education system. Drawing on immersive ethnographic research in homes and schools from 2018 to 2021, Gabrielle Oliveira offers an intimate portrait of these families' experiences. She weaves together stories of parental sacrifice, children's educational and migration journeys, and educators' responses to trauma—all shaped by the additional disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Faculty Associate Gabrielle Oliveira is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and of Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

David and Goliath: Commentaries on the Russo-Ukrainian War

By Serhii Plokhy

The biblical image of David and Goliath captures fittingly the nature of the war that Russia, the world’s largest country by surface area, unleashed on neighboring Ukraine, a country that—while still the largest on the European continent—is almost thirty times smaller and has only over a quarter of Russia’s population. Yet Ukraine’s stubborn resistance proves that it is possible to mount a successful defense against an enormously larger, more populous, and better equipped enemy, even despite its threats of nuclear apocalypse should Ukraine refuse to submit and the West dare to interfere. This volume shows that history can help reveal the reasons for Ukraine’s resolve and success on the battlefield and in the public arena.

Read more at Harvard University Press ⇒

Faculty Associate Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University.

Artificial Intelligence and Education in the Global South: A Systems Perspective

Coauthored by Fernando Reimers

Book cover for Artificial Intelligence in Education in the Global South.

This open-access book examines the dynamic intersection of artificial intelligence and education in the Global South, where resource constraints and demographic trends create unique challenges and opportunities. Adopting a systems perspective, it explores how AI can transform teaching, curriculum, assessment, teacher professional development, school leadership and system governance while addressing AI literacy, improving the effectiveness of education and developing transferable skills. The book highlights the risks of exacerbating existing inequalities if technology is not carefully integrated and stresses the importance of human-centered, locally adapted solutions. The book examines whether AI is supporting innovation or the transformation of education systems and how it is addressing the principal most vexing challenges with respect to the areas examined. Each chapter draws on an analysis of the potential of AI, on evidence of its use and on evaluation on the implementation and effectiveness of applications. Each chapter concludes with main takeaways for policy and practice, key ethical issues and questions that merit more research.

Educating for a Climate Changed Future: From First Order Impacts to System Level Transformation

Coauthored by Fernando Reimers

Book cover for Educating for a Climate Changed Future.

This open-access book offers a comprehensive, systems-level examination of how schooling and climate change shape one another. Drawing on insights from climate science, comparative education, education policy, and implementation research, it distinguishes between first‑order effects—how climate hazards and slow-onset changes disrupt learning—and second‑order effects—how education systems respond through curriculum, teacher preparation, infrastructure, operations and community engagement. It maps five major narratives of climate change education—climate literacy, climate action, green economy skills, education for sustainable development and critical/decolonial approaches—and shows how they coexist and interact in global frameworks and national policies. Moving from policy to practice, it analyzes national case studies of policy reform, case studies of transformation at the school level and examines the role of educator networks and of eco-systems supporting climate change education efforts. Using a complexity science perspective, it explains why many systems remain in “low climate learning traps” and outlines realistic strategies to escape them and achieve systemic policy coherence, offering guidance for researchers, policymakers, practitioners and graduate students working toward climate‑ready education systems.

Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers

By Benjamin Robert Siegel

For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium—how it was farmed, refined, and used to build modern medicine and shape state power—has remained largely untold.

Drawing on archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the United States, Markets of Pain traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants in India, Turkey, and Australia to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource and a means of securing global stature. In postcolonial India, by contrast, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value amid the shifting currents of the Cold War. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon.

Read more at Oxford University Press ⇒

Weatherhead alum Benjamin Robert Siegel is an assistant professor of history at Boston University.

Magdalena Coline: A Life Beyond Slavery in Mediterranean Europe

By Daniel Lord Smail

In 1387, a young Muslim woman from North Africa was captured on a galley in the Bay of Naples and brought to Marseille as a slave. For more than ten years, she was held in bondage to a shipwright and privateer named Peire Huguet. Daniel Lord Smail tells the extraordinary story of Magdalena Coline, a woman who dared to file suit against the man who called himself her master, and whose passage from servitude to freedom raises tantalizing questions about how the people of her time made sense of slavery as a social category.

Faculty Associate Daniel Lord Smail is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University.

Constitutionalism and Its Discontents

Coauthored by Mark Tushnet

In the early twenty-first century, constitutionalism confronts numerous pressures and critiques. Some prominent critics are concerned that constitutionalism’s modern form, in which high courts play a large role, limits popular self-governance. By committing their nations to detailed social and economic policies—from neoliberal requirements for balanced budgets to constitutionalized social welfare and environmental rights—many modern constitutions might make promises they cannot keep and be unduly rigid in the face of changing social, economic, and environmental conditions. Meanwhile, the rise of proto-authoritarian elected leaders around the world shows that constitutions are vulnerable to, and may even enable, democratic backsliding.

Faculty Associate (emeritus) Mark Tushnet is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School.

Chasing Events: 9/11 and Other Cases in the American, French, and Dutch Public Spheres (2001 – 2021)

By Thijs van Dooremalen

This book introduces a novel research approach to capture event effects: “chasing” the direct associations actors make with them. Thijs van Dooremalen applies this approach to the meaning-making of 9/11 and a variety of other cases—the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Madrid train and Charlie Hebdo attacks, the Arab Spring, the first Trump election, and COVID —across the American, French, and Dutch public spheres. Combining computational and qualitative text analyses, he “chases” these events from 2001 to 2021. This results in key lessons on how foreign events spark domestic debates, under which conditions they evoke social change, and their long-term, path-dependent “lives.”

Causal Mediation Analysis

Coauthored by Xiang Zhou

Geoffrey T. Wodtke and Xiang Zhou's Causal Mediation Analysis offers a comprehensive yet accessible guide to causal mediation analysis for social scientists. They explore why an exposure affects an outcome by quantifying the processes and mechanisms through which a causal effect operates. Covering everything from traditional methods through machine learning techniques and experimental designs for analysing mediation, the authors make these methods broadly accessible through clear explanations, practical examples, and the inclusion of extensive Stata and R code, allowing readers to replicate all the empirical illustrations and apply the methods directly to their own data. Starting with methods for intuitive, simple settings, they build up to more complex analyses, ensuring a smooth learning experience. Rich in examples from across sociology, psychology, political science, and economics, the authors demonstrate the application of cutting-edge methods to real-world empirical research, providing practical tools and examples for rigorous empirical research across disciplines.

Faculty Associate Xiang Zhou is a professor of sociology at Harvard University.