New Books in Intellectual History
Episodes
Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and ...
Matthew Elia, "The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery" (Yale UP, 2024)
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery (Yale UP, 2024) offers a bold rereading of Augustinian thought for a worl...
Conor McCabe, "The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly, 1889-1898" (Iskra Books, 2024)
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Conor McCabe is a research fellow with Queen’s Business School, Queens University Belfast. He is the author of numerous policy and research repo...
Mary Lindemann and Deanna Shemek, "Redreaming the Renaissance: Essays on History and Literature in Honor of Guido Ruggiero" (U Delaware Press, 2024)
10 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Redreaming the Renaissance: Essays on History and Literature in Honor Guido Ruggiero (University of Delaware Press, 2024) seeks to remedy the dearth...
Amín Pérez, "Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle" (Polity Press, 2023)
09 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How did the Algerian war of independence shape contemporary sociology? In Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Strugg...
Roberto Morales-Harley, "The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater” (Open Book, 2024)
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater (Open Book, 2024) presents a sophisticated and intricate examinatio...
Roni Henig, "On Revival: Hebrew Literature Between Life and Death" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On Revival: Hebrew Literature Between Life and Death (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is a critique of one of the most important tenets of Zionist thinki...
Doyle D. Calhoun, "The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire" (Duke UP, 2024)
06 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A note about content: This episode involves discussion of suicide, specifically in the contexts of slavery, colonization and empire. Please use your d...
Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024)
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting w...
Hannah Weaver, "Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past" (Cornell UP, 2024)
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Weaver examines the mediaeval pr...
Simeon Koole, "Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us...
Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern ...
Avi Shlaim, "Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew" (Oneworld, 2024)
03 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In July 1950, Avi Shlaim, only five, and his family were forced into exile, fleeing from their beloved Iraq into the new state of Israel. Now the rump...
Robert A. Schneider, "The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
02 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The term “resentment,” often casually paired with words like “hatred,” “rage,” and “fear,” has dominated US news analysis since Novemb...
Thinking Machines: The First AI Takeover Story
02 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920)....
Georgia Henley, "Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024)
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, Reimagining ...
Nicholas Spencer, "Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion" (Oneworld, 2024)
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Most things you 'know' about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespr...
Dariusz Wojcik et al., "Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money" (Yale UP, 2024)
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of fina...
Lennard J. Davis, "Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It" (Duke UP, 2024)
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dicken...
Bihani Sarkar, "Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It is often assumed that classical Sanskrit poetry and drama lack a concern with the tragic. However, as Bihani Sarkar makes clear in Classical Sansk...
The Wisdom of Our Ancestors
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Based on The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Conservative Humanism and the Western Tradition (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), this week’s conversa...
Eric Helleiner, "The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History" (Cornell UP, 2021)
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell UP, 2021) helps m...
Sarah Dimick, "Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures" (Columbia UP, 2024)
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the d...
Peter Harrison, "Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. 'We are apt', says Hume, 'to imagi...
Toni Alimi, "Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Augustine believed that slavery is permissible, but to understand why, we must situate him in his late antique Roman intellectual context. Slaves of ...
Eve Dunbar, "Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
27 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation (U Minnesota Press, 2024) offers new and insightful readings of Africa...
Simon Kuznets and the Invention of the Economy
27 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is us...
Himanshu Upadhyaya, "Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India (1850–1980)" (Springer, 2024)
25 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India: Tracing the Pre-history of Green and White Revolutions (Springer 2024) traces the cont...
Derek Hook, “Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis” (Routledge, 2018)
25 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How can Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” shed light on Lacan’s maxim, “The unconscious is structured like a ...
Deborah Valenze, "The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History" (Yale UP, 2023)
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and envi...
Seth Kimmel, "The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U Chicago Press, 2024) Seth Kimmel explores the material history of librari...
Vanessa Christina Wills, "Marx's Ethical Vision" (Oxford UP, 2024)
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Does Marx have a coherent ethical vision? How does that square with his sometimes-scathing dismissal of morality? What does his critique of capital ha...
Benjamin Bergholtz, "Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel (U Nebraska Press, 2024) offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s...
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and c...
Sonja Stojanovic, "Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
20 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visibl...
Lois Peters Agnew, "Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric" (U Alabama Press, 2024)
19 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric (U Alabama Press, 2024) is a thought-provoking exploration of the relations...
Anne Higonnet, "Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution" (Norton, 2024)
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, ...
Christopher Smith, "Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching i...
Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Beth Blum, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spo...
Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri, "Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad Ibn Qasim Al-Hajari Between Europe and North Africa" (U California Press, 2023)
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The first in-depth study of the collaborative intellectual exchange between the European and the Arabic Republics of Letters. Beyond Orientalism: Ah...
The Social Contract in the Ruins: A Conversation with Dr. Paul DeHart
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we sit down with Dr. Paul DeHart, professor of Political Science at Texas State University and author of ...
Jane Lydon, "Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land?" (Routledge, 2021)
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery ...
Jacques Bertrand, "Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2022)
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Southeast Asia Program Publications/Cornell UP, 2022) asks why the ...
Rochelle Gurstein, "Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art" (Yale UP, 2024)
13 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the...
Theo Williams, "Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation" (Verso, 2022)
13 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Theo Williams’ Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation (Verso, 2022) shows how bla...
Helena Taylor, "Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2024)
13 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellect...
Chris Cutrone, "Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory 2006-2024" (Sublation Media, 2024)
12 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel...
Satoru Hashimoto, "Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2023)
11 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature beca...
Michael Tilton Williams, "Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta" (de Gruyter, 2024)
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of ...
Roberta L. Millstein, "The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has been both hugely influential in the environmental conservation movement – and also often misinterpreted. In The Lan...
Luke Clossey, "Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520" (Open Book, 2024)
09 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation lo...
Critique, Wonder, and Chinese Anatomy, with Lan A. Li
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with the show’s producer, Lan A. Li, a historian of Chinese science, medicin...
The Ideology of Democratic Athens
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are Clavis Aurea: a dynamic team constantly looking for ways to make the academic publishing industry grow and to promote groundbreaking academic ...
A Deep Dive on Karl Marx's "Capital"
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over 150 years ago, Marx published the first volume of Capital, a systematic and voluminous account of capitalism, from the economic bedrock all the ...
Iris Jamahl Dunkle, "Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb" (U California Press, 2024)
06 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collect...
Kyle Falcon, "Haunted Britain: Spiritualism, Psychical Research and the Great War" (Manchester UP, 2023)
06 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Great War haunted the British Empire. Shell shocked soldiers relived the war's trauma through waking nightmares consisting of mutilated and grotes...
Michael J. Thompson, "Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism" (Routledge, 2024)
05 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, 2024), Michael J. Thompson reconstructs the concept and practic...
Sean McMeekin, "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism" (Basic Books, 2024)
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia ...
Alexandre Lefebvre, "Liberalism as a Way of Life" (Princeton UP, 2024)
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why liberalism is all you need to lead a good, fun, worthy, and rewarding life—and how you can become a better and happier person by taking your lib...
Faisal Devji, "Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea" (Harvard UP, 2013)
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India's Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in...
William Cook Miller, "The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture" (Cornell UP, 2023)
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of a character type that was develo...
Camille Owens, "Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America" (NYU Press, 2024)
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (NYU Press, 2024) argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure...
Julia Caterina Hartley, "Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France" (Bloomsbury. 2023)
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Julia Caterina Hartley about Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbur...
From Tribalism to Common Humanity: A Conversation with Dr. John Ellis
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For most of recorded history, neighboring countries, tribes, and peoples everywhere in the world regarded each other with apprehension—when not outr...
Naomi Seidman, "In the Freud Closet: Psychoanalysis and Jewish Languages" (Stanford UP, 2024)
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and sup...
Samuel Ely Bagg, "The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We commonly think of democracy as a social order governed by the people’s collective will. Given the size of the modern states, this picture is typi...
Jerome E. Copulsky, "American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order" (Yale UP, 2024)
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A question has long hung over the the United States regarding the proper role of religion in public life. Those who long for a Christian America c...
Paola Bertucci, "In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science. In 1749, the celeb...
Estelle Tarica, "Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America" (SUNY Press, 2022)
29 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022) proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust conscio...
Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, "Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood" (India Viking, 2024)
29 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav’s book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (Penguin Random House India, 2024) undertakes a s...
J. C. D. Clark, "The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
28 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents...
Jack A. Goldstone, "Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2023)
27 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In their pursuit of social justice, revolutionaries have taken on the assembled might of monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. They have often, thou...
David L. Swartz, "The Academic Trumpists: Radicals Against Liberal Diversity" (Routledge, 2024)
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Remember the bleach drinking episode? Remember ‘alternative facts’? Remember ‘I have the best words’? These elements of the Trump presidency s...
Alessandra Russo, "A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400-1600" (Penn State UP, 2024)
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to think of sixteenth-century European artistic theory as separate from the artworks displayed in the non-European sections of museums. In A ...
William H. F. Altman, "Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic" (Lexington, 2012)
24 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington, 2012), William Altman shines a light on the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato,...
Rafal K. Stepien, "Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness" (Oxford UP, 2024)
24 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers asid...
Jason A. Josephson Storm, "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Jose...
Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, "The Spectre of State Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
22 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial cri...
Gergely Gosztonyi, "Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices" (Springer, 2023)
22 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering...
Jack Palmer, "Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
22 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jack Palmer’s Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) invites us to reconsider a ...
Sarah Lewis, "The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America" (Harvard UP, 2024)
21 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans ...
Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
21 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, a...
Tom Navon, "Radical Assimilation in the Face of the Holocaust: Otto Heller (1897–1945)" (SUNY Press, 2024)
21 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This book explores the confrontation of radically assimilated Jews with the violent collapse of their envisioned integration into a cosmopolitan Europ...
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde" (FSG, 2024)
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-ce...
Zrinka Stahuljak, "Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scho...
William H. F. Altman, "The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism" (Lexington Books, 2010)
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish emigrant to the United States, an author, professor and political philosopher. Born in 1899 in Kirchhain in the Kingdo...
Karl Marx, "Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1" (Princeton UP, 2024)
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Th...
Kevin J. McMahon, "A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many scholars and members of the press have argued that John Roberts’ Supreme Court is exceptional. While some emphasize the approach to interpretin...
Michael D. Hattem, "The Memory of '76: The Revolution in American History" (Yale UP, 2024)
15 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Americans agree that their nation’s origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly two hundred a...
Theodore Papakostas, "How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator" (William Collins, 2024)
14 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Two strangers meet in a trapped elevator. One is an archaeologist, the other isn’t. A simple question, ‘What do you do?’, becomes the springboar...
Lynn M. Tesser, "Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics" (Stanford UP, 2024)
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most ...
Whitney Barlow Robles, "Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History" (Yale UP, 2023)
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dive into the world of animals with Whitney Barlow Robles in her captivating new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Yale UP, 2...
Isaac Nakhimovsky, "The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation" (Princeton UP, 2024)
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Prin...
Geoffrey D. Claussen, "Modern Musar: Contested Virtues in Jewish Thought" (Jewish Publication Society, 2022)
11 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Geoffrey D. Claussen about Modern Musar: Contested Virtues in Jewish Thought (Jewish Publication Society, 2022). How do modern J...
Morgane Cadieu, "On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
10 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes. Social clim...
Anthony Michael Kreis, "Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development" (U California Press, 2024)
09 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One of the great divides in American judicial scholarship is between legal scholars who take the justices at their word and assume that those words de...
Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019)
08 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the...
Ana Stevenson, "The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
08 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Ana Stevenson explores the ubiquity of what she term...
Sara E. Johnson, "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023)
07 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Sain...
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France" (Duke UP, 2018)
06 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwi...