New Books in Urban Studies

In Warsaw: A City at War 1939–45 (Osprey, 2026), historians Prit Buttar and Lottie Taylor bring to light the unparalleled experience of a city caught between two invading powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the resilience of its citizens.

This fascinating history illuminates how Warsaw's centuries-old fight for identity shaped the course of its wartime experience. For a mere 21 years, Warsaw thrived as the proud capital of an independent Poland, only to be betrayed when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939. Yet the heart of the city – its people – refused to surrender. From the tragic Ghetto Uprising to the heroic city-wide revolt, Warsaw's resistance was fierce as it faced the systematic attempt to erase it from the map. The story does not end with the conclusion of the war, as Warsaw found itself trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

This compelling narrative is not just about battles – it's about a city and its inhabitants, whose unwavering spirit defined them in the darkest of times. Drawing from rare archival material including countless first-hand accounts, Warsaw's wartime years are majestically brought to life.

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1976 marked a turning point in New York City history. It was arguably the city's lowest point since 1776, when much of lower Manhattan burned following the British occupation during the American Revolutionary War. Two centuries later, the city was burning again, this time in isolated pockets of the South Bronx and North Brooklyn, where years of disinvestment and the closure of firehouses left neighborhoods increasingly vulnerable. New York's fiscal crisis had reached a breaking point.
At the same time, a new generation of musicians, artists, and nightlife entrepreneurs was reshaping the city's cultural landscape. From disco and punk to downtown art and underground music, New York became the center of a cultural moment whose influence continues to shape how we think about the city today. In this special episode, we look back at 1976 and the years that followed through the exhibition You Should Be Dancing: New York, 1976 and Beyond, exploring the music, personalities, and places that defined the era.
Produced in collaboration with the New-York Historical Society, host Ryan Purcell sits down with historian Ted Widmer, guest curator of the exhibition. Widmer is a historian, author, and former presidential speechwriter whose work explores American politics, culture, and history. He also has a less conventional connection to the music world as a member of The Upper Crust, a Boston-based rock band known for performing in powdered wigs and eighteenth-century aristocratic dress.
We talk about his experience in the band, the relationship between music and history, and what it takes to bring a complicated period of New York's cultural history into a museum exhibition. Purcell also reflects on his own work as a curatorial consultant on the project, collaborating with Widmer and New-York Historical Society curator Allison Robinson.

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Two girls are born in the same Chicago hospital. Their neighborhoods—just seven train stops apart—will shape their futures and help determine how long they live. One will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday. The other will die before sixty-five.

This is the death gap: lives lost too soon. Crossing the Gap: Healing Epidemics and Inequalities in a Divided City (U Chicago Press, 2026) asks how a city with world-class hospitals can tolerate an epidemic of premature death—and tells the story of the people fighting to end it.

In his landmark book The Death Gap, physician and health equity leader David A. Ansell exposed how structural racism and poverty shorten lives. He moves beyond diagnosis in Crossing the Gap to explore what happens when a major medical center joins forces with pastors, community organizers, residents, and young leaders on Chicago’s West Side to redefine what a hospital owes its neighbors. Part medical memoir and part urban chronicle, Crossing the Gap follows groundbreaking initiatives such as West Side United and the Sankofa Wellness Village as they confront decades of disinvestment and work to build healthier communities.

Through stories of collaboration, courage, conflict, and community leadership, Ansell shows how neighborhood voices, rigorous data, and moral imagination can transform health systems from bystanders into partners for change—not just in one city but throughout the nation.

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Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development, progress, and neighborhood changes are observed. But what does gentrification sound like?
In Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, (Oxford UP, 2025), author Allie Martin engages this question in Washington, DC, asking how Black people experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Drawing from music, interviews, soundscape recordings, and more, Martin argues that gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others. Martin employs a combination of methodologies from ethnomusicology, Black Studies, geography, and digital humanities to make audible the ways in which gentrification disrupts and disturbs community. Throughout, she centers Black feminist listening practices, thinking through digital modes of listening and imagining emancipatory soundscapes.
Intersectional Listening benefits from an innovative combination of sources, from interviews and soundwalks to passive acoustic recording and machine learning. Martin shares compelling stories of music and sound in the nation’s capital, and in doing so shifts conversations about how we listen to Black life. By foregrounding how processes of gentrification systematically seek to devalue, mishear, and ultimately silence Black possibility, Intersectional Listening posits how we can challenge ourselves to refute the consistent mishearing of Black people in Washington, DC and beyond.​
Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist and artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. She is an assistant professor in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work is attuned to questions of race, sound and power. Her first book, Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, explores the relationships between race, sound, and gentrification in the nation's capital. Allie is the director of the Black Sound Lab, a research environment dedicated to amplifying Black life and decriminalizing Black sound through digital practice.

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In this episode, James Farrer of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective and Alejandra Dorado-Vinay talk about their introduction to the new special section on migrant foodways and culinary mobilities in Japan. Taking listeners into the neighborhoods of superdiverse Tokyo through everyday experiences of markets, restaurants, and eating out in the street, they discuss how histories of power shape migrant foodways, and how migrants in Japan shape its local culture. Their conversation connects taste, fashion, and power in Japan’s vibrant migrant food scene, shedding light on the culinary imports of curry and ramen, the experience of Peruvian migration, and a cosmopolitan landscape of Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Brazilian, and East African and West African restaurants in a place where migrant foodways can often be largely invisible. The two-part special section in the Fall and Winter 2026 issues of Gastronomica brings together 10 articles on the movement of people, food, and ideas across borders with research on eateries, markets, community gardens, social media, school meals, and holiday rituals in Japan.
Listeners can find "Introduction to Migrant Foodways and Culinary Mobilities in Japan" by James Farrer and Alejandra Dorado-Vinay, and their co-written follow-up piece, “Culinary Regimes: The Political Economy of Foreign Food in Tokyo” in Gastronomica (issues 26.3 and 26.4).
James Farrer is a professor of Sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo and a member of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica. He has published numerous books and articles on urban life, globalization, and cuisine and is currently at work on a comparative study of migrant-run restaurants in Japan and Germany.
Alejandra Dorado-Vinay is completing a PhD in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, where her work focuses on Mexican and Peruvian food in Japan. Previously, as a student at El Colegio de México, she conducted research on the history of Japanese restaurants in Mexico City. Beyond her academic work, she also has experience in food and beverage consulting in Japan.
Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies is published by the University of California Press. Quarterly issues are available in print and online.
Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the latest episodes.

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