New Books in Intellectual History
Episodes
Frederick Reece, "Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon" (Oxford University Press, 2025)
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We all know about art forgeries, but why write fake classical music? In Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon (Oxford U...
Mark Somos, Matthew Cleary, Pablo Dufour, Edward Jones Corredera, and Emanuele Salerno, "The Unseen History of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2025)
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Unseen History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2025) locates and describes almost one thousand surviving copies of the first nine ...
Introducing The Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"Princeton University Press is thrilled to share news of a major new initiative: the publication of The Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung. ...
Brook Ziporyn, "Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism.Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two a...
J. McKenzie Alexander, "The Open Society as an Enemy: A Critique of how Free Societies Turned Against Themselves" (LSE Press, 2024)
14 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie Alexander Nearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper g...
J. McKenzie Alexander, "The Open Society as an Enemy: A Critique of how Free Societies Turned Against Themselves" (LSE Press, 2024)
14 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie Alexander Nearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper g...
Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, "Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective" (Columbia UP, 2025)
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the last third of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between totalizing doctrines—nationalist, Marxist, a...
Questions: A Discussion with Leslie Butler and Holly Case
06 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
BOOKS UNDER DISCUSSION: Leslie Butler, Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford Univers...
Brando Simeo Starkey, "Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System" (Doubleday, 2025)
06 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System (Doubleday, 2025) takes readers...
Christoph Schuringa, "Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
04 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philoso...
Jack Ashby, "Nature's Memory: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History Museums" (Penguin, 2025)
01 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Nature's Memory: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History Museums (Penguin, 2025), zoologist Jack Ashby shares hidden stories behind th...
Catriona M.M. MacDonald, "The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History" (John Donald, 2024)
31 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why did Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries know so little about their past and even less about those who controlled their history? Is the...
Derek J. Penslar, "Zionism: An Emotional State" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Emotion lies at the heart of all national movements, and Zionism is no exception. For those who identify as Zionist, the word connotes liberation and ...
Yitzhak Conforti, "Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What many people don’t realize is that Zionism is not a monolithic term. From its inception there were rigorous debates about the nature and directi...
Dan Sperrin, "State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature" (Princeton UP, 2025)
28 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime’...
Kirsten Macfarlane, "Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2024)
27 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Early modernity has long been seen as a crucial period in the history of biblical scholarship, witnessing rapid advances in studies of Hebrew, Greek, ...
Anne C. Klein on Becoming a Buddha & Being Human too
26 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
You’re human, but are you also a Buddha? If so, which one comes first? What does it mean to be human? What is a Buddha exactly? Is our humanity lost...
Book Talk 66: Political Hope, with Loren Goldman
24 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How to find hope in these times? I spoke with political scientist Loren Goldman about the principle of political hope: why we should have hope, how to...
Jennifer T. Roberts, "Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture" (Princeton UP, 2024)
24 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Covering the whole of the ancient Greek experience from its beginnings late in the third millennium BCE to the Roman conquest in 30 BCE, Out of One, ...
Yosie Levine, "Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate" (Littman Library, 2024)
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
My recent interview with Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine about his book, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate (Li...
Jon Shelton, "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy" (Cornell UP, 2023)
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the o...
David Kraemer, "Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora" (Oxford UP, 2025)
21 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2025) analyzes biblical and rabbinic texts, philosophical treatises, studie...
Quentin Skinner, "Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? Liberty as Independence: The Making a...
Richard Calis, "The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius" (Harvard UP, 2025)
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. ...
Rasheedah Phillips, "Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time" (AK Press, 2025)
18 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we...
Eric Heinze, "Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left" (MIT Press, 2025)
17 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that peopl...
Marc Shapiro, "Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook" (Littman Library, 2025)
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Rav Kook’s Vision: Halakhah, Secular Knowledge, and the Renewal of Judaism. Those of us who know something about Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook’...
Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic y...
Daniel Behar, "Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
14 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh UP, 2025) examines a poetic movement that rose from under official state discourse in 1970s Syria ...
Globalization's Backlash: Echoes of the Interwar Era in Today’s World
10 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This week on International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey interviews historian Tara Zahra, author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass ...
Nancy M. Rourke, "Ecological Moral Character: A Catholic Model" (Georgetown UP, 2024)
09 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The images we use to think about moral character are powerful. They inform our understanding of the moral virtues and the ways in which moral characte...
Aaron Robertson, "The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America" (FSG, 2024)
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in ...
Paul Chrystal, "Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome" (Reaktion, 2025)
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Both humorous and shocking, Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome (Reaktion, 2025) by Paul Crystal is filled with astonis...
Matthew Daniel Eddy, "Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was ...
Timothy Twining, "The Limits of Erudition: The Old Testament in Post-Reformation Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The history of early modern biblical scholarship has often been told as a teleological narrative in which a succession of radical thinkers dethroned t...
Judith Vitale, "The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan" (Harvard UP, 2024)
04 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Although Japan was never conquered by the Mongol empire, the 1274 and 1281 Mongol invasions were commemorated, remembered, and imagined in Japanese hi...
Tithi Bhattacharya, "Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal" (Duke UP, 2024)
03 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali gho...
Donald S. Prudlo, "Stimulus Pastorum: A Charge to Pastors" (St. Augustine's Press, 2022)
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The work of St. Bartholomew of Braga, O.P. (1514-1590) appears here in English for the first time despite its long and enduring influence in ecclesias...
Nat Dyer, "Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray" (Bristol UP, 2024)
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the workings of financial markets to our response to the ecological crisis, economic theory shapes the world. But where do these ideas come from?...
Laura Spinney, "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Star. Stjarna. Setareh. Thousands of miles apart, humans look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see. Listen to these Eng...
Jeff Sebo, "The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why" (Norton, 2025)
29 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritize humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast num...
Russell Blackford, "How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this pos...
Mehrdad Alipour, "Negotiating Homosexuality in Islam: A Legal-hermeneutical Examination of Modern Shīʿī Discourse" (Brill, 2024)
27 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does Islam, particularly Shīʿī Islam, really say about same-sex sexual relations? Can Islamic legal frameworks, rooted in centuries of jurispr...
Franck Billé, "Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity" (Duke UP, 2025)
27 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity (Duke UP, 2025), Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state ...
Udi Greenberg, "The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s" (Harvard UP, 2025)
26 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Reconciliation between Europe's Protestants and Catholics led to a new era of Christian collaboration. Why did these erstwhile foes end their schis...
Christopher Harding, "The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East" (Allen Lane, 2024)
25 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Harding’s The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) is a fascinating survey of two millenni...
Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books" (Yale UP, 2022)
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he rea...
Fernanda Gallo, "Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
23 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Pr...
Shushma Malik, "The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
22 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge UP, 2020), Shushma Malik reconstructs the means by which the emperor Nero cam...
Margherita Zanasi, "Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic...
Talia Mae Bettcher, "Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
20 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does transphobic oppression have to do with sexism, heterosexism, and racism? How does a decolonial analysis help us understand trans oppression?...
Samuel Ross, "Qur’an Commentary and the Biblical Turn: A History of Muslim Exegetical Engagement with the Biblical Text" (de Gruyter, 2024)
19 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Quran Commentary and the Biblical Turn (de Gruyter, 2024) examines the exegetical relationship between the Quran and the Bible in Islamic intellectu...
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity: A Study in Resilience" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The city was one of the central and defining features of the world of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Challenging the idea that the ancient city 'd...
Henry Jenkins, "Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America" (NYU Press, 2025)
14 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 60s produced a Baby Boom generation that catalyzed the dawn of a new era—the space age, the age of television, the global age, and the beginning...
David Wiles, "Democracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
13 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Democracy, argues David Wiles, is actually a form of theatre. In making his case, the author deftly investigates orators at the foundational moments o...
Stephen J. Campbell, "Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life" (Princeton UP, 2025)
12 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed nex...
Richard Alfred Muller, "Predestination in Early Modern Reformed Theology" (Reformation Heritage Books, 2024)
11 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Predestination in Early Modern Reformed Theology (Reformation Heritage Books, 2024), Dr. Richard A. Muller delves into one of the most controvers...
Matthew D'Auria et al., "The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The origins and nature of nationhood and nationalism continue to be topics of heated scholarly debate. This major new reference work with contribution...
Benjamin M. Studebaker, "Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
09 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are toda...
Bruno Leipold, "Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2024)
08 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2024), Bruno Leipold argues that, cont...
Eli Rubin, "Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism" (Stanford UP, 2025)
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025), Eli Rubin provides a comprehe...
Katherine Hallemeier, "African Literature and US Empire: Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
06 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
African Literature and US Empire Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing (Edinburgh UP, 2024) demonstrates how African literatur...
Benjamin P. Davis, "Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
05 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Benjamin P. Davis’s Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh University Press 2025) provides one of t...
Julia Jarcho, "Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Julia Jarcho proposes that the desire to write is inextricably bou...
Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, "Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Although Indigenous peoples are often perceived as standing outside political modernity, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State (Uni...
Sam Klug, "The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
02 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. Sam Klug reveals the centra...
Letizia Osti, "History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature" (I. B. Tauris, 2024)
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Abu Bakr al-Suli was an Abbasid polymath and table companion, as well as a legendary chess player. He was perhaps best known for his work on poetry an...
Sarah Bassett, "Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual product...
Hannan Hever, "Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism: Chapters in Literary Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
30 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) reveals how political and literary dialogues and conflicts between the Hebrew literature of...
Rune Nyord, "Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
29 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterl...
William Max Nelson, "Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Enlightenment Biopolitics (U Chicago Press, 2024), historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopol...
William H. F. Altman, "Ascent to the Beautiful: Plato the Teacher and the Pre-Republic Dialogues from Protagoras to Symposium" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)
26 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With Ascent to the Beautiful, William H. F. Altman completes his five-volume reconstruction of the Reading Order of the Platonic dialogues. This book...
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with s...
Peter Sloterdijk Knows it All
23 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest is Dr Thomas Sutherland, author of the Bloomsbury title, Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason ...
Surekha Davies, "Humans: A Monstrous History" (U California Press, 2025)
23 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science in Humans: A Monstrous History (University o...
Andrew Clapham, "War" (Oxford UP, 2021)
22 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This book poses the question: How relevant is the concept of war today? Professor Andrew Clapham of the Graduate Institute of International and Develo...
David D. Grafton, "Muhammad in the Seminary: Protestant Teaching about Islam in the Nineteenth Century" (NYU Press, 2024)
21 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Uncovers what Christian seminaries taught about Islam in their formative years Throughout the nineteenth century, Islam appeared regularly in the curr...
Mick Brown, "The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West" (Oxford UP, 2023)
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mick Brown’s The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Oxford UP, 2023) is a riveting account about the West's engagement w...
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and Neil Roberts, "Creolizing Hannah Arendt" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and Neil Roberts have edited a new collection of essays, Creolizing Hannah Arendt. This edited volume dives into Hannah Arendt’...
Simon Rabinovitch, "Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History" (Yale UP, 2024)
19 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is a common assumption that in Israel, Jews have sovereignty, and in most other places where Jews live today, they have religious freedom instead. ...
Andrew Janiak, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2024) introduces the work and legacy ...
Chance E. Bonar, "The Author in Early Christian Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
While scholars of ancient Mediterranean literature have focused their efforts heavily on explaining why authors would write pseudonymously or anonymou...
Kobi Kabalek, "Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)
16 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism (U Wisconsin Press, 2025), Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews duri...
Nima Bassiri, "Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against...
Ken Frieden, "Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction" (Syracuse UP, 2016)
12 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries before its "rebirth" as a spoken language, Hebrew writing was like a magical ship in a bottle that gradually changed design but never vo...
Gregory Soderberg, "John Brown of Haddington on Frequent Communion" (Wipf & Stock, 2024)
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Shallow and quickly outdated Christian worship practices have left many searching for something with deeper roots. Many churches have rediscovered the...
Emma Borg and Sarah A. Fisher, "Meaning: a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2024)
09 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our ability to find meaning in things is one of the most important aspects of human life. But it is also one of the most mysterious. Where does meanin...
Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)
08 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Harvard UP, 2023) is a revelatory new account of the magus―the learned magician―and his place i...
Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)
08 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's ...
Jeffrey A. Lenowitz, "Constitutional Ratification Without Reason" (Oxford UP, 2022)
04 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Constitutional Ratification Without Reason (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on constitutional ratification, the procedure in which a draft constitution is ...
David N. Livingstone, "The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2024)
02 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists, journalists, and politicians increasingly tell us that human impacts on climate constitute the single greatest threat facing our planet an...
Erik Baker, "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" (Harvard UP, 2025)
02 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Success...
Ellen Fenzel Arnold, "Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, C. 300-1100" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
01 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen...
Wan-Chuan Kao, "White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages" (Manchester UP, 2024)
28 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wan-Chuan Kao analyses premodern whiteness as operations of...
Christina Kiaer, "Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
26 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Rea...
Gregory Castle et al., "The Irish Bildungsroman" (Syracuse UP, 2025)
26 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The classical Bildungsroman charted an idealized path of human development—the harmonization of individual desires with societal norms in the format...
Religious Freedom: A Conversation on the Conservative Tradition with John D. Wilsey
26 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this conversation, we sit down with John D. Wilsey, Professor of Church History and Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Sen...
Rhiannon Stephens, "Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History" (Duke UP, 2022)
22 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke UP, 2022), Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in ea...
Amit Levy, "A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel" (Brandeis UP, 2024)
21 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Brandeis UP, 2024) explores the fascinating history of Zionist and Israeli...
William M. Paris, "Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation" (Oxford UP, 2024)
20 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How does time figure in racial domination? What is the relationship between the capitalist organization of time and racial domination? Could utopian t...