New Books in Intellectual History
Episodes
Daniel J. Sherman, "Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Sarah talks to Daniel J. Sherman about his most recent book, Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940...
What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The speech debates have not abated, and it’s clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not sett...
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone" (Columbia UP, 2025)
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express ...
David M. Whitford, "The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity" (Routledge, 2025)
05 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David Whitford joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity (Routl...
Georgios Varouxakis, "The West: The History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2025)
04 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin ...
Erin M.B. O'Halloran, "East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars" (Stanford UP, 2025)
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Between the First and Second World Wars, activists across the British Empire began to think about what their homes might look like as independent nati...
Katharine Jenkins, "Feminist Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Katharine Jenkins offers an introduction to feminist philosophy, giving the reader an idea of what it is, why it is important, and how to think about ...
Matt Myers, "The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989" (Oxford UP, 2025)
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The European left seemed to be in rude health during the 1970s. Never had so many political parties committed to representing the working class been i...
William H. F. Altman, "The Revival of Platonism in Cicero's Late Philosophy: Platonis Aemulus and the Invention of Cicero" (Lexington Books, 2016)
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Revival of Platonism in Cicero's Late Philosophy: Platonis Aemulus and the Invention of Cicero (Lexington Books, 2016) argues that Cicero deserv...
Todd McGowan, "The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The difficulty of Jacques Lacan's thought is notorious. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan cuts through this difficulty to provide a clear, j...
Karen Stollznow, "Bitch: The Journey of a Word" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
28 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bitch is a bitch of a word. It used to be a straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations and efforts to reject or reclaim the word –...
Carol Atack, "Plato: A Civic Life" (Reaktion, 2025)
27 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Plato is a key figure from the beginnings of Western philosophy, yet the impact of his lived experience on his thought has rarely been explored. Born ...
Ecodefense: Dave Foreman and Earth First!’s Deep Ecology
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A cowboy hat-wearing Goldwater conservative named Dave Foreman got religion and then founded the most radical environmental group of recent memory, Ea...
Authoritarian Ideas, Old and New: From Schmitt to “JD”
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director, Eli Karetny talks with Richard Wolin (Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center) ...
Nicholas Bromell, "The Time is Always Now: Black Political Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2013)
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Bromell is the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Labor and Literature in Antebellum American Culture and Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psyc...
Wendell Marsh, "Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities" (Columbia UP, 2025)
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of know...
Jon Mills, "End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Jon Mills, has had an impressive career as practicing professional, researcher, educator and writer in the psychology and psychoanalytic field. H...
Jonathan White and Lucas Morel, "Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln" (Reedy Press, 2025)
20 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. W...
Our Common Future: The Birth of Liberal Environmentalism
19 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is the second episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their ...
Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025)
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely acr...
Zahi Zalloua, "Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
n a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinker...
Vanessa Sinclair et al., "The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond" (Routledge, 2024)
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) is an exploration of psychoanalysis' often complicat...
Alex R. Tipei, "Unintended Nations: How French Liberals' Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with...
Spike Bucklow, "The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac" (Reaktion Books, 2025)
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Spike Bucklow joins Jana Byars to talk about The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac (Reaktion, 2025). This delightful book defies genre. It is a journey...
Kevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of the Fall of France" (Yale UP, 2025)
13 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone e...
Matthew Benjamin Cole, "Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century" (U of Michigan Press, 2025)
13 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see...
Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power....
Leah Hochman and Stanley M. Davids, "Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought" (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023)
07 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Judaism is the story of change. Throughout Jewish history, revolutionary events and subversive ideas have burst forth, repeatedly transfo...
Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the...
Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025)
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia Univer...
Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This ...
Oswyn Murray, "The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present" (Harvard UP, 2024)
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks ...
Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book ...
David Edmonds, "Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need" (Princeton UP, 2025)
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine this: You’re walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around fo...
Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Foreca...
Ḥannā Diyāb, "The Book of Travels" (NYU Press, 2022): A Conversation with Johannes Stephan
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Book of Travels Ḥannā Diyāb: A Conversation with Johannes StephanThe Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account o...
Chris Millington, "A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
31 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
FASCISM...FRANCE. Two words/ideas that scholars have spent much time and energy debating in relationship to one another. Chris Millington's A Histor...
Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances dep...
Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025)
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers ...
Ian Scoones, "Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World" (Polity, 2024)
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the fu...
Francesca Stavrakopoulou, "God: An Anatomy" (Knopf, 2022)
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words...
Omid Safi, “Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition” (Yale UP, 2018)
24 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It's often touted that Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the United States. That may be the case but popular renderings of the writings of this...
Nick Spencer, "The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What Are We Disagreeing About?" (Oxford UP, 2025)
24 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The relationship between science and religion has long been a heated debate and is becoming an ever more popular topic. The scientific capacity to man...
Michelle P. Brown, "Bede and the Theory of Everything" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
23 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bede and the Theory of Everything (Reaktion Books, 2023) investigates the life and world of Bede (c. 673–735), foremost scholar of the early Middle...
Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Winter Dreams: A Historical Guide to Old Age" (Reaktion, 2025)
23 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Winter Dreams: A Historical Guide to Old Age (Reaktion, 2025) is an evocative history of the ways the old have thought, felt and expressed themselves...
Vinay Lal, "Gandhi, Truth, and Nonviolence: The Politics of Engagement in Post-Truth Times" (Oxford UP, 2025)
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The anthology presents a diverse array of essays delving into Gandhi's political activities, ethical beliefs, and philosophical stance. Distinguished ...
Catherine Malabou, "Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy" (Polity Books, 2023)
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do so many philosophers value anarchy but refuse to call themselves anarchists? Why don’t philosophers draw on the classical anarchist tradition...
Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (Penn State University Press, 2021) a provocative book, Marla Segol explores the developme...
Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from M...
Rob Goodman, "Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is political rhetoric broken – and how can it be fixed? Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions (Cambridge University Press, 2022) returns ...
Raphael Cormack, "Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult" (Norton, 2025)
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An international history of the uncanny in the 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fak...
José Vergara, "All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature" (Cornell UP, 2021)
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (Cornell UP, 2021) explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and...
Nabil Yasien Mohamed, "Ghazālī’s Epistemology: A Critical Study of Doubt and Certainty" (Routledge, 2024)
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Focusing on Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) – one of the foremost scholars and authorities in the Muslim world who is central to the Islamic in...
Isabella M. Weber, "How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate" (Routledge, 2021)
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholes...
Thomas Kemple, “Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
16 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s w...
Enrique Dussel, "The Theological Metaphors of Marx" (Duke UP, 2024)–A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta
16 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Theological Metaphors of Marx (Duke UP, 2024) by Enrique Dussel – A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta In The Th...
Liz Fischer, "Network Analysis for Book Historians: Digital Labour and Data Visualization Techniques" (Arc Humanities Press, 2025)
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Researchers and archivists have spent decades digitizing and cataloguing, but what does the future hold for book history? Network Analysis for Book H...
David Theo Goldberg, "The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism" (Polity Press, 2023)
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism (Polity Press, 2023) by David Theo Goldberg discusses how “Critical Race Theory” i...
Vinay Lal, "India and Its Intellectual Traditions: of Love, Advaita, Power, and Other Things" (Oxford UP, 2024)
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The book, the third volume to emerge from the enterprise known as 'The Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics', attempts to further the col...
Eli Zaretsky, “Political Freud: A History” (Columbia UP, 2015)
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Back in the early 70s, Eli Zaretsky wrote for a socialist newspaper and was engaged to review a recently released book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism by...
Federico Marcon, "Fascism: The History of a Word" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the ter...
Alan M. Wald, "Bohemian Bolsheviks: Dispatches from the Culture and History of the Left" (Brill, 2025)
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For several decades now, Alan Wald has been thoroughly documenting the history of the literature and cultural output of the American left. While his n...
Russell Shorto, “Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom” (Norton, 2017)
10 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton, 2017) is a history of many revolutions, kaleidoscopic turns through six indiv...
Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass” (UP of Kentucky, 2018)
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is o...
Margaret C. Jacob, "The Secular Enlightenment" (Princeton UP, 2019)
08 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday l...
Maxim Samson, "Earth Shapers: How Humans Mastered Geography and Remade the World" (Profile Books, 2025)
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mountains, meridians, rivers, and borders--these are some of the features that divide the world on our maps and in our minds. But geography is far les...
Daniel José Gaztambide, "Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon's Couch" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Both new and seasoned psychotherapists wrestle with the relationship between psychological distress and inequality across race, class, gender, and sex...
Murad Idris, "War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought" (Oxford UP, 2019)
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term ...
William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025)
03 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left ...
Alexander Douglas, "Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self" (Random House, 2025)
03 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Against Identity, philosopher Alexander Douglas seeks an alternative wisdom. Searching the work of three thinkers – ancient Chinese philosopher ...
Chris Washington, "Nonbinary Jane Austen" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
02 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Nonbinary Jane Austen, Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that...
Philip Cunliffe, "The National Interest: Politics After Globalization" (Polity Press, 2025)
02 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Globalization is over. With US president Donald Trump pursuing an 'America First' agenda in trade and foreign policy, everyone now recognises the urge...
Hanno Sauer, "The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality " (Oxford UP, 2024)
02 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is ...
John Givens, "The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak" (Northern Illinois UP, 2018)
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Dr. John Givens of ...
Martin Shuster, "Critical Theory: The Basics" (Routledge, 2024)
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why does critical theory matter today? In Critical Theory: The Basics (Routledge, 2024), Martin Shuster, a Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac...
Martin Shuster, "Critical Theory: The Basics" (Routledge, 2024)
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why does critical theory matter today? In Critical Theory: The Basics (Routledge, 2024), Martin Shuster, a Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac...
Thomas M. Kemple, "Marx's Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Marx’s Capital looms large today, a century and a half after first publication, a massive tome that attempts to document and map out the dynamics ...
Jeremy DeWaal, "Geographies of Renewal: Heimat and Democracy in West Germany, 1945-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The term “Heimat,” referring to a local sense of home and belonging, has been the subject of much scholarly and popular debate following the fall ...
Christopher Ocker, "Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther str...
Aline Nardo, "Evolutionary Theory and Education" (Brill, 2025)
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How has evolutionary theory shaped educational thinking over the past two centuries? ‘Evolutionary Theory and Education: The Influence of Evolution...
Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to und...
Christy Pichichero, "The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon" (Cornell UP, 2018)
28 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Covering the pivotal period from the mid-seventeenth century through the era of the French Revolution, Christy Pichichero's The Military Enlightenme...
Marion Bower, "The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality" (Routledge, 2018)
27 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’...
Christopher T. Fleming, "Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurisprudence" (British Academy, 2025)
23 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This monograph outlines the core principles of equity and trusts in Sanskrit jurisprudence (Dharmaśāstra) and traces their application in the practi...
Marc Herman, "After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World" (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World offers a dynamic new perspective on medieval Jewish legal thought and its integr...
Joseph Kellner, "The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse" (Cornell UP, 2025)
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Spirit of Socialism is a cultural history of the Soviet collapse. It examines the millions of Soviet people who, during the cascading crises of t...
How ClioVis is Transforming Education and Historical Research
19 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learnin...
Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious chan...
Alexander Lian, "Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
13 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A unique and thorough work of intellectual history and legal scholarship Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education (Cambridge Univ...
Samuel Kline Cohn, "Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy" (Oxford UP, 2022)
11 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Samuel K Cohn, Jr. joins Jana Byars to talk about Popular Protest and the Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford University Press, 2...
Robert G. Morrison, "Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe" (Stanford UP, 2025)
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on kno...
Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
05 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. Peop...
153: What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against antic...
Hans Joas and Matthias Bormuth eds., "The Anthem Companion to Karl Jaspers" (Anthem Press, 2025)
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Anthem Companion to Karl Jaspers (Anthem Press, 2025) edited by Hans Joas and Matthias Bormuth is a collection of articles by an international ...
Yonatan Y. Brafman, "Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
30 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, Jewish thinkers have asked two parallel questions. First, what is the reasoning behind an individual commandment and second, why bother...
Nubar Hovsepian, "Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual" (AUC Press, 2025)
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete’s temperament, he did not ex...
Kevin J. Hayes, "Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin" (Oxford UP, 2025)
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An exploration of the mind of one of America's most beloved Founding Fathers and most brilliant minds, through the books he read and his social circle...
Bernd Roeck, "The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance" (Princeton UP, 2025)
22 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today I’m speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025)....
David Crystal, "Bookish Words and Their Surprising Stories" (Bodleian Library, 2025)
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Bookish Words & their Surprising Stories (Bodleian, 2025) by Dr. David Crystal, explore how books have played a pivotal role in the history of En...
Emmanuel Akyeampong, "Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders" (Indiana UP, 2023)
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders (Indiana UP, 2023)explores Africa's political economy in the first two full decades of in...