Andrew has put together one of the first English comprehensive histories of the Warring States period in his new book To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor (Oxford UP, 2026)

Andrew Seth Meyer is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the author of The Dao of the Military: Liu An's Art of War and co-author of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China.
 

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of To Rule All Under Heaven. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
 

 Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Meghan Garrity examines why and how governments expel, providing a systematic, cross-regional account of mass expulsion over the longue durée. Using the original Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset, the book explains when and where expulsion occurs, who is targeted, and what regimes are most likely to expel. The book identifies two overarching categories of mass expulsion—security and economic—and develops a typology of four corresponding types: counter-irredentist, counter-subversive, reprisal, and nativist. It advances a theory of mass expulsion that traces the decision-making process, showing how key structural, proximate, precipitating, and intervening factors combine to shape the conditions under which governments expel or are restrained. Evidence is drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Nations archives in Geneva, Switzerland.
This research contributes to the fields of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. Conceptually, it fills a gap in the literature by systematically examining mass expulsion as a distinct eliminationist policy aimed at the intentional removal of ethnic groups. Theoretically, it extends existing explanations beyond war and security threats, highlighting an entire class of expulsions targeting perceived economic threats. The book deepens our understanding of critical atrocity restraints, demonstrating the importance of alliances, the “homeland” state of the target group, and international organizations. These restraints generate core policy recommendations that seek to spur greater attention to deterring mass expulsion as a priority for atrocity prevention.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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• A ground-breaking theory of the self as a pattern
• Interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, psychiatry, and dynamical systems analysis
• Discusses the role of self-narrative in self-formation, its breakdown in various psychopathologies, and its role in therapy
• Explores the phenomenology of agency and its disruption in various psychopathologies
• Outlines a 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) approach to understanding the effects of different therapies for psychopathologies

Shaun Gallagher offers an account of psychopathologies as disorders of the self. The Self and its Disorders develops an interdisciplinary approach to an 'integrative' perspective in psychiatry. In contrast to some integrative approaches that focus on narrow brain-based conceptions, or on symptomology, this book takes its bearings from embodied and enactive conceptions of human experience. Gallagher offers an understanding of the self as a pattern of processes that include bodily, experiential, affective, cognitive, intersubjective, narrative, ecological and normative factors. He provides a philosophical analysis of the notion of self-pattern; then, drawing on phenomenological, developmental, clinical and experimental evidence, he proposes a method to study the effects of psychopathologies on the self-pattern. The book includes specific discussions of schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, borderline personality disorder, and autism, among other disorders, as well as the effects of torture and solitary confinement. It also explores a variety of issues that relate to therapeutic approaches, including deep brain stimulation, meditation-based interventions, and the use of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Prof Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis

Shaun Gallagher, PhD, Hon DPhil., is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong. He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012-18) and has held Honorary Professorships at Tromsø University (Norway), Durham (UK), and Copenhagen (DK), as well as visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Oxford, and Rome. His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social cognition, and concepts of self. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Find Shaun here.

Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy. Find Anya here

Original recording by Badger Made, Hobart. Contact: billygbadger@gmail.com

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The study and teaching of English literature is generally regarded as one of the central disciplines in the modern university, yet for much of its history it struggled to gain academic legitimacy and was frequently derided as 'a soft option'. Its early professors responded by emphasizing its scholarly character, foregrounding philology and literary history in ways that marked the syllabus far into the twentieth century.

Stefan Collini provides here the first full account of the discipline's development from its late-eighteenth-century beginnings up to the early 1960s. Paying special attention to institutional settings, he challenges numerous assumptions about the character of universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the detailed exploration of syllabuses, exam papers, and other institutional records, the impact of literary criticism is revealed to be later and more partial than is commonly assumed. Rather than seeing the early teaching of English literature as 'a substitute for religion' or 'a means to soften class conflict', Collini emphasizes the role of ideals of learnedness and scholarship, as well as of external factors such as opportunities for employment in the civil service and secondary school-teaching. There are full discussions of the parts played by such figures as John Churton Collins, A.C. Bradley, George Saintsbury, and Walter Raleigh, together with sceptical analyses of the decisive significance usually attributed to Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and F.R. Leavis. Separate chapters are devoted to neglected aspects of the story such as the role of Classics, the importance of the subject for women's higher education, and the connections with English teaching in schools.

Drawing on extensive use of institutional archives and records as well as the writings of contemporary participants, the book offers a vivid and wide-ranging history of English-as-discipline and its centrality across academic, literary, cultural, and educational life over the past two year hundred years, as well as a resounding testament to its continued importance and relevance today.

Stefan Collini, Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge. Stefan Collini was educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Research Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, he was Lecturer, then Reader, in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex 1974-86; Lecturer, then Reader, then Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge 1986-2014. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and Guardian.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. 

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In Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford UP, 2025), Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.
As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life--including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people--sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington's Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women's education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.
In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.

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Based on a combination of cultural analysis of historical writings and—most strikingly—deep immersion in often very spicy Chinese social media fora, Chenchen Zhang’s new book Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China (Oxford University Press, 2026) theorises the shifting significations ascribed to ‘the West’ in China since the late-imperial collision with European empires. Whether imagined as a source of modernity, a colonial exploiter, geopolitical rival or—most recently—a civilisation sunk into decadence and decay, ‘the West’—Zhang shows—is a foil for China-based worldviews which, whatever their anticolonial or anti-Western sentiments, are also entangled with Eurocentric hierarchies of race, nation and gender whose patriarchal and civilisational histories are rooted at least partly that very same ‘West’.

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The rise and evolution of the taifa of Denia is a powerful case study for understanding the construction of medieval maritime states in the Mediterranean. Dr. Bruce situates Denia within the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate and explores how its rulers forged legitimacy through identity formation, maritime violence, and regional connectivity. Denia's identity was negotiated through rulership, unfreedom, and cultural hybridity, and violence — particularly predatory warfare and maritime jihad — functioned as both statecraft and economic extraction. At the same time, Denia's entanglement in commercial, diplomatic, and intellectual networks positioned it as a key node linking the Islamic Mediterranean and the Latin West. The state's trajectory cannot be reduced to narratives of decline or simple religious conflict but instead reveals a process of negotiation shaped by mobility, interdependence, and the fluid boundaries between public and private power. This narrative reframes Mediterranean history beyond Eurocentric paradigms and underscores the significance of Islamic maritime states within the wider medieval world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Open Access here

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For much of American history, members of the majority population of the United States indiscriminately attacked and terrorized minority communities. In some parts of the country, mob violence seemed a near-constant part of the region's history, while in others it was a brief, horrific spasm that perpetrators--but not victims--quickly forgot.

In American Pogroms, terrorism expert Daniel Byman argues that there is a word for this type of communal violence: pogrom. Although pogroms are historically associated with the orchestrated campaigns of anti-Jewish violence in Tsarist Russia, Byman asserts that pogroms have been an all-too-frequent feature of American history. Tracing two centuries of communal violence, Byman recounts cases of attacks against American religious minorities such as Catholics and Mormons, the killing of thousands of ethnic Mexicans in Texas, the murder and wholesale expulsion of Chinese workers from the American West, and the repeated attacks on the Black community that killed thousands and enabled decades of brutal discrimination. In all these cases, pogroms helped cement a system of injustice that left religious, ethnic, and racial minorities politically and economically marginalized. While the idea of mob violence now strikes most Americans as unthinkable, Byman warns that increased polarization and selective news consumption in recent years has coarsened discourse and legitimized violence, raising the risk that at least some violence will return.

A broad-ranging synthesis of how and why majorities have so frequently resorted to community-level violence to restore or cement their power, American Pogroms illustrates the outsized role of violence in U.S. history and how it shapes the country today.

Daniel Byman is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Frydl lays out the foundation for the analysis within the framework of liberalism, classical liberalism and modern liberalism. She takes pains to explain these distinctions and how our understanding of liberalism has also contributed to some of the shifts and adjustments that have transpired. What does become clear in all of the case studies and details is that this is really a story about the United States Congress—not the Judiciary—and that Congress has been responsible for many of these changes, even if these actions seem to elide public attention and scrutiny. In fact, it is very difficult to detect Congress’s role in these instances, where Congress acted to essentially remove the Judiciary’s powers to deliberate in these policy realms.

Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is about corporate identity politics, and the ways in which corporations worked to fend off regulatory reform, while not exactly using the expected pathways. Since corporations, unlike, say women or African Americans, do not have a history of exclusion or disadvantage within the American political or economic systems, the concept of corporate identity politics seems a bit odd, but Frydl makes a strong case for this understanding, through the case studies of Catholic hospitals and regulatory reform that provides an avenue towards allowing for more religious freedoms and protections for the hospitals themselves; the legislative reforms with regard to criminal codes in the 1970s and 1980s that instituted harsher sentencing guidelines for individuals but much more lax responses to corporate infractions; and finally in a comparative study of corporate speech regulation and speech regulation of labor unions in the United States. Frydl tells the story from all perspectives and dimensions, including who was working behind the scenes to move these protections forward over the past fifty years. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is a very important analysis of the strengthening of the position of corporate entities within the political, legal, and economic systems in the United States.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She is also author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not In My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Each chapter focuses on a specific formal device that emerged from colonial misreadings: “uncommonplacing” in Richard Hakluyt’s travel compendium; metonymic possession in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine; “seasoning” in Ben Jonson’s city comedies; “stagewreck” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and “stagework” in the Lord Mayor’s Shows.

By approaching form as an interpretive process that is always engaged in the act of making and being made, Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form offers a model for reading past the seeming impasses of colonial narratives. It shows how narratives of failed settlement served as a productive resources for the formal worldmaking conventions of early modern theater.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance.

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In A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, Polly Zavadivker tells how Jewish civilians experienced that war and its epicenter of violence on the Eastern Front. World War I transformed the lives of East European Jews in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. State violence and forced migration determined many aspects of Jewish wartime and revolutionary experience. These policies not only destroyed much of traditional Jewish life but also inadvertently compelled a transformation of Jewish civil society. The collapse of Russian imperialism enabled the growth of an empire-wide humanitarian campaign to rescue the “nation of refugees,” whose plight embodied that of the Jewish nation itself. By exploring this history of Jewish humanitarianism during World War I, Zavadivker provides the origin stories of key leaders and public institutions that served East European Jewry in the interwar years and during the Holocaust.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Zavadivker about this book, led by historian Eliyana Adler.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on February 25, 2025.

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For generations, lifnim mi-shurat ha-din has been understood to mean acting "beyond the letter of the law"—choosing generosity or compassion over strict legal obligation. Barer challenges that assumption. Through a close reading of classical rabbinic texts, she argues that the Talmud originally used the phrase not to describe a particular kind of moral act, but a particular way of making decisions. Rather than rigidly following established rules, rabbis sometimes improvised, departing from expected patterns in pursuit of the right outcome for a unique case.

By tracing how this idea developed from in the Talmud, Barer uncovers how one phrase evolved into a cornerstone of Jewish ethical thought. Her work invites readers to rethink the relationship between law and morality, showing that creativity and flexibility have always been part of the rabbinic legal tradition.

Together, Barer and Katz explore why improvisation matters in Jewish law, how the Talmud balances consistency with compassion, and what this ancient model of decision-making can teach us about navigating difficult moral questions today.

Deborah Barer is Senior Faculty with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, with an emphasis on rabbinic literature and Jewish ethics. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Towson University, and she has also taught at Oberlin College and for the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies (North America). She served as the editor of the Journal of Textual Reasoning.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS)

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Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) explores how and why the movement became popular among India’s diaspora from the second half of the twentieth century. It shows that Hindutva ideology and its plethora of organizations have a distinctive resonance and way of operating overseas; the movement and its ideas perform significant, particular functions for diaspora communities.
Edward T.G. Anderson argues that transnational Hindutva cannot simply be viewed as an export: this phenomenon has evolved and been shaped into an important aspect of diasporic identity, a way for people to connect with their homeland. He also sheds light on the impact of conservative Indian politics on British multiculturalism, migrant politics and relations between various minority communities.

Sachin Nikarge has extensively worked in consultative capacity with prominent foreign/diplomatic missions across both ‘hard’ as well as ‘soft’ power domains.

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Open Access: here

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In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators.

When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution.

Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it.

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Rock ‘N’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2026) explores the complex musical styles and evolutions of the genre and also examines it as product, symbol, and vehicle of societal change. The introduction seamlessly integrates the genre with elements of 1955-1965's mass influence including the rise of television and niche radio formats, the civil rights movement, a new concept of "teenagers" as a unique age group, and a sexual revolution. Rock 'n' Roll traces the rise and trajectories of the styles and musicians grouped as rock 'n' roll and their journey to becoming emblems of much more

Elijah Wald is a Grammy winning writer, musician, and historian. His books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music; Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories; The Mayor of MacDougal Street (source for the movie Inside Llewyn Davis); and Dylan Goes Electric! (source for the movie A Complete Unknown). He has taught at various universities and holds a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics.

Elijah Wald’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.

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Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

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In this new book, Jenny Labendz explores the relationship between this world and the best possible world, the limits of that best possible world, and asks a crucially grounding question--what are we talking about when we're talking about the end of the world?

Interviewee: Jenny R. Labendz received her PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2010 and was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Francis College until 2025. She is also the author of Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture, published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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From the late nineteenth century, Ireland featured prominently in Russian liberal, conservative, and radical debates about land politics, self-determination, and empire. Equally, Irish commentators from across the political spectrum used Russia as a lens onto questions of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. But while the Irish and Russian revolutionary contexts are well-studied in isolation, their myriad political, social, and cultural entanglements are not.
Drawing on extensive Russian and Irish archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, literary, and visual sources, Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923 (Oxford UP, 2026) looks in both directions at Irish responses to Russian revolutionary change and at representations of Ireland in Russian-language texts from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. The result is a unique account of international engagement in revolutionary Russia and Ireland and of how Ireland was imagined beyond the Anglophone world. This mutual, if selective and conditional, engagement reflected wider technological changes in news communication and the expansion of international news agencies. Diasporic networks, including in Britain and the US, helped to shape Russo-Irish relations and Irish publications and political actors engaged with different parts of the Russian empire, including Ukraine, Finland, and Poland.
Through five thematic chapters, the book considers Russo-Irish relations from contrasting and often overlooked angles, including Irish eyewitness experiences on the Eastern front during World War One and religious perspectives. Using a transnational methodology and expansive source base, the book offers a fresh angle on the entangled history of revolutions in the early twentieth century and the translation of news and ideas across borders.

Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905–1923 will be published in September 2026 with Oxford University Press

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These inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities. Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of scale within the country's new political autonomies, even as old-style nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades.

Privileging the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever's research draws from the authors' combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a decolonizing state.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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⁠Sue Donaldson⁠ is a Canadian author and animal advocate. She has published more than 40 academic articles, and is the co-author, with Will Kymlicka, of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011) which won the Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize in 2013, and has been translated into 11 languages. She is co-convenor of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics research group at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.

⁠Will Kymlicka⁠ is the author of seven books published by Oxford University Press, including Contemporary Political Philosophy (2nd ed., 2001), Multicultural Citizenship (1996), and Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (co-authored with Sue Donaldson; 2011). He is currently the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His works have been translated into 34 languages.

⁠Kyle Johannsen⁠ is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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The leader was a remarkable character, wrestling with personal and professional dilemmas: Hans Welser. An Austrian refugee and one-time MI5 suspect interned behind barbed wire, Welser was a great survivor who rose to become special operations adviser to the Foreign Office, working hand in glove with MI6. His second in command was an eccentric, hard drinking, and high-flying journalist-turned-propagandist called John Rayner. Brought out of semi-retirement, for one final posting. Their team of bowler-hatted refugees, voluble ex-journalists, trailblazing women, and licentious literary sorts navigated loyalty and betrayal — both professionally and romantically — from the diplomats' attic, in the most sensitive part of the Foreign Office's secret propaganda department.

The newly declassified files expose an array of plots, some comically absurd and others dangerously controversial. The forgery empire impersonated everything from hippies and ghosts to Islamists and ballet composers in their campaign to smear hostile politicians, stir tensions among adversaries, and even stymie the career of a contentious British historian. All took place against a high stakes backdrop — both overseas as states competed beneath the looming threat of nuclear war and in the corridors of power at home where grey-suited bureaucrats circled, keen to shut down the team for good.

With timely insight into how propaganda works and how to respond to disinformation, Fakers is a thrilling journey into a secret world where nothing was as it seemed.

Rory Cormac is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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In order to understand this theory of psychological authoritarianism, the authors trace the idea from origins in critical theory and pre-World War I European thinkers (Freud, Benjamin, etc.) who were examining the concepts of conformity vs. autonomy, and how these ideas functioned in political life. The authors also examined differing approaches to child-rearing, since this also reflects these same concepts of conformity and autonomy, but in how they are put into practice in bringing up children, either with more freedom or in a more rules bound approach. In using these measures, Federico, Feldman, and Weber also pulled together data from election surveys starting in the 1990s and moving forward that include questions that get at some of the same ideas. The authors also used experiments to test individual inclinations towards autonomy or uniformity. The thrust of voter’s choices was not about economics or specific public policy in these analyses, but around social issue differentiation and social context. The research for The Authoritarian Divide is complex and brings together a variety of different methodological approaches in order to examine this political divide, and to tease out the impact of psychological authoritarianism in American politics.

The Authoritarian Divide: Partisan Identity, Voting, and the Transformation of the American Electorate reveals that this inclination towards psychological authoritarianism is much more prevalent among white conservative voters than among other voting blocs in the United States. This has also led voters to sort themselves within the two parties accordingly, with far more of those who are inclined towards psychological authoritarianism moving into the Republican Party, and fewer moving into the Democratic Party. The result of this sorting has contributed to the rise in polarization within American politics over the past thirty years.

The Authoritarian Divide explains a lot about voter thinking and approaches to American politics over the past three decades. It helps to decipher the entrenched polarization because the examination is not about policy distinctions or issues, it is about how individual voters think and why they are inclined to think in particular ways about politics. The authors clearly assess the distinctions within the voting populace of the United States, and, in so doing, unpack different approaches to voting and vote choices in different sectors of the electorate. The Authoritarian Divide really helps us to understand our current political climate and to see how the rise of Donald Trump fits into a temporally longer era of American politics, partisan politics, racial politics, and the tensions between democracy and authoritarianism.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based creator and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender and nationalism—and in the ways these intersect within the Central Asia context.

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In his book, Dr. Flores examines the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights Era in the United States has served to maintain rather than challenge racial hierarchies. He and Brynn discuss the lasting legacies of this institutionalization within neoliberal ideologies for Spanish-English bilingual education in the United States from the post WWII era to today.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Churchill and the Crown (Oxford University Press, 2026) tells the story of Churchill's relationship with the various kings and queens he served during his long political career, from young journalist under Edward VII, through his dramatic fall from grace in the First World War under George V, the frustrations of appeasement during the interwar period and his relationship with Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936, culminating in his Finest Hour in the Second World War under George VI and the coda of Churchill's public service to his final monarch: Queen Elizabeth II.

Ted Powell analyses Churchill's writings on monarchy and his role in preserving and establishing monarchies outside Britain. At the core of the book is a series of studies of Churchill's relationships with the monarchs he served. These studies offer a two-way perspective, examining both Churchill's view of individual monarchs and their attitudes towards him. They shed light not only on Churchill's career but also on the changing role of the monarchy in 20th century Britain.

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New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Katherine Krauss is Assistant Teaching Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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21st Century Yakuza illuminates how Japan's model of regulatory saturation has dismantled the Yakuza's organisational capacity but left behind governance vacuums in markets the state struggles to control. This book demonstrates how the Yakuza persist through symbolic and residual forms of authority even as their formal power erodes, and how their decline has fragmented the criminal underworld. It traces the transformation of the Yakuza from territorially embedded brokers of governance to marginal actors in a more decentralised criminal landscape, including the delegation of trading activities to non-affiliated networks.

Through a sharp lens on criminal decline and adaptation, 21st Century Yakuza offers a compelling portrait of a fading underworld and the new forms of disorder emerging in its wake. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the shifting boundaries of law, authority, and illicit power in contemporary Japan.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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In Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926 (Oxford University Press, 2026), award-winning author and historian Jonathan Schneer mines hitherto untapped archival sources to explain why and how the Strike came about, why and how it was waged and countered, why and how it ended. In addition to government reports and TUC reports, he uses reports of undercover agents and spies, "special" constables sworn in for the duration of the Strike, volunteer strike-breakers, Communist agitators, trade-union leaders and rank-and-file members of trade unions; also, of course, the papers of politicians of all parties.

This is a tale of Shakespearian dimensions, replete with tragic heroes and villains and buffoons and opportunists and double-dealers, and contending, evenly matched, forces - both of which meant to do their duty whatever the cost. There may never be another general strike in Britain, but the General Strike of 1926 was one for the ages, illuminating the human condition.

Jonathan Schneer is Professor Emeritus of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of New Books Network.

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Traditional news history has overlooked a key fact for understanding this era of news: that Victorian daily newspapers were high-pressure systems. As demand for newspapers outpaced their original production capacity, newspaper organizations began to build complex technical and production mechanisms to continue to grow and compete. As these systems expanded, newspapers became dependent on them, and decisions about how daily journalism should develop began to pass from editorial choice to systemic necessity. The previously untold story of Victorian daily news is that the personalities of editors and owners and the larger social forces at work in that era were not the only (or even primary) drivers of its history. Once set in motion, the systems of Victorian news gained major shaping agency over their own development.

Combining deep archival research and traditional historical analysis with modern data mining methods, News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885 (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Dallas Liddle reconstructs the systemic workings of Victorian daily news in unprecedented detail, offering new and counterintuitive accounts of when and why daily papers expanded, how and why steam-powered printing machines developed, how specialized news discourses evolved, and how newspaper leadership was organized.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Over the past 50 years, no single philosopher has offered a comprehensive exploration of honesty—how we define it, how it diverges in private and public spaces, and how it depends on shared perceptions of reality. Dr. Christian Miller addresses this gap, while showing how modern life increasingly rewards dishonesty, with profound consequences for our relationships, institutions and culture—a phenomenon he names The Honesty Crisis (Oxford UP, 2026).

From cases such as sermon plagiarism to AI-assisted cheating to the rise of fake news, Dr. Miller explores how dishonesty has become easier, more pervasive and even normalized in our society. Yet The Honesty Crisis does more than diagnose the problem: it proposes concrete, practical steps to preserve honesty where it matters most.

Guest: Dr. Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. The author of numerous articles and books, he also directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She holds a Ph.D. in history which she uses to explore which stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. She is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

• Understanding Disinformation
• When Your Professor Asks You To Cheat
• The Last Human Job
• Who Gets Believed
• The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
• What Do You Want Out of Life
• The Museum of Failure
• The Well-Gardened Mind
• A Meaningful Life
• The Good- Enough Life
• Tell Me What You Want

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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These categories are presented as natural truths, but Dembroff reveals them as man-made myths--ones that construct a reality in which being characterized as Woman, Animal, or Child marks moral degradation. By no coincidence, feminization, dehumanization, and infantilization are the very degradations used to make a man 'less of a man'.

But this book is more than critique; it's also a guide to transformation especially for those grappling with what it means to be a man under patriarchy. Patriarchy's myths celebrate the identity Man, but these myths are no friend to most men. Promising strength and superiority, they instead fuel isolation, emotional repression, and relentless pressure to prove oneself while propping up systems that enrich the powerful few. Rather than deliver freedom and prosperity, these myths entrap and impoverish. Real Men on Top invites readers to see through them and, in so doing, to find new possibilities for living, relating, and becoming human.

Sharp, daring, and deeply felt, Real Men on Top is a book for anyone who senses that something is deeply wrong with the way we live and wants to understand how we got here, and where we might begin the work of remaking reality.

Robin Dembroff is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale University

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Interview hosted by Dr. Eve Vincent, on behalf of the Journal of Industrial Relations, prepared by Social Media and Outreach Editor Dr. Paula de la Cruz-Fernández. 

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At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can’t understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen.

Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law’s research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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In The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time (Oxford University Press, 2026), Rivka Weinberg argues this is because there are different kinds of meaning, and some of them, sadly, are impossible to achieve. She explains what they are, illuminates which types of meaning are possible, which are impossible, and shows us how we might orient our lives in light of these bittersweet truths. Although we all die in the end, Weinberg explains why death doesn't make life more or less meaningful. Instead, it is time that is necessary for meaning, even as it also undermines it by wearing away the fruits of our efforts and commitments. Weinberg shows that most advice on how to reduce the agony of time's erosions cannot work. However, she also shows how we can tease out some insights from failed attempts to escape time's wounds and thereby make progress toward coping with things as they are. A meaningful life is one lived in the fullness of time, accepting suffering, acknowledging our tragic losses and limitations, and making the most of Everyday Meaning.

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Drawing from philosophy, psychology, and mental health theory, Dr. Ayob explores how people evaluate emotions and how those evaluations shape our understanding of emotional disorder.

In the author’s framing, the concept of “emotional disorder” is not simple or straightforward. It is built upon many smaller judgments we make about emotions, including whether emotions are reasonable, excessive, disruptive, socially acceptable, or connected to a person’s lived experience.

Key Ideas:

• The book examines how emotional disorders are conceptually defined.
• Explores whether modern society sometimes medicalizes ordinary emotional experiences too quickly.
• Lived experience, personal meaning, and context all influence how emotions are understood.
• Encourages deeper reflection about the assumptions society makes when labeling emotions as healthy or pathological.
• Emotional awareness and reasoning are connected.
• Understanding our emotions can help us better understand ourselves and the world around us.

One of the strongest ideas from the discussion was that human beings process emotions through their own lived reality and personal experiences. What may feel distressing or emotionally overwhelming does not automatically mean it is a disorder. Sometimes emotional pain is part of being human, especially during difficult life experiences, loss, uncertainty, stress, or change.

The conversation also emphasized the importance of emotional self-awareness and reasoning. Being informed about our emotions may help us better understand our reactions rather than immediately viewing every difficult emotional experience through a strictly medical lens.

Angela Marie Hutchinson is the author of “Create Your Yes! When You Keep Hearing No,” named a Forbes No. 4 book to advance your career. She is a podcast host for New Books Network, where she leads conversations for the neuroscience and Christianity channels. Hutchinson is also a talent and intellectual property executive, former social media professor and BBC commentator. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.

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Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026) traces the shift from the colorful, flamboyant attire of the eighteenth century to the plain dark suit of the nineteenth century, characterizing this style evolution as a "Sartorial Revolution." In this book, American historian and costume designer Chloe Chapin traces the evolution of masculine style from the American Revolution through the Civil War and shows how men's suits shaped relationships of gender and power. Drawing on a wealth of visual and written sources, she shows how the plainness of suits symbolized new ideals of rationality and democracy and played a crucial role in framing the lasting identity and authority of American men. This richly illustrated book analyzes fashion history's impact on gender dynamics and emphasizes the dynamic relationships between bodies, clothing, and personal identity.

Suitable demonstrates the significance of fashion beyond mere appearance, illustrating the key role modern men's suits have played in shaping the modern world.

Chloe Chapin holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University and master's degrees in fashion and textile studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology and costume design from the Yale School of Drama. She has taught fashion history, costume design, gender studies, and anthropology. As a costume designer for over twenty years, her credits include Broadway musicals, opera, and Shakespeare. She works at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, in A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.

While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts

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The four ideas, as author H. A. Drake proposes, are monotheism, the idea that there is only one god, not many; individual rights, the idea that there is a limit to what the state can order us to do; naturalized citizenship, the idea that the full rights and privileges of citizenship can be extended to people who have no birthright to them; and creation of a standard by which to judge the performance of states. It is easy, now, to take these ideas for granted. For believers, it seems obvious that only a singular, omnipotent deity can account for the splendour of the universe. Similarly, the common notion that individuals can stand up for their rights, that citizenship can be freely given, or that governments ought to be held to a standard of justice for all, is often accompanied by the assumption that, at the time they were introduced, such ideas must have been immediately recognized as superior and gratefully accepted. The record is far more complicated, and that makes the story of their success far more interesting. By discussing these ideas in their historical context with clarity and wit, The Wisdom of the Ancients reminds readers how preposterous they were originally and how different our world would be if they had not taken hold.

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On the contrary, The Birth of Psychological War demonstrates the role of psychological warfare in expanding the scope and scale of military violence amidst ostensible efforts to 'win hearts and minds'. While casting a critical eye on psychological warfare, Whyte establishes its continued significance for the contemporary student of international relations.

Dr. Whyte earned his Ph.D. with the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia and before that a MA with School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, also in beautiful British Columbia. He is currently Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Despite extensive study of co-operatives' real and imagined benefits, we know little about the conditions under which they achieve the lasting scale needed to be a viable alternative and transform the economy. Under what conditions can co-operatives achieve such scale? And are such conditions present in the United States, where, despite repeated organizing efforts, co-operatives remain exceptionally rare at scale?

Through a rigorous comparative-historical analysis of co-operative enterprises in different national contexts, Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American? (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jason Spicer seeks to answer these questions. Deploying two different variants of the new institutionalism, Dr. Spicer treats the United States as a central case of comparative failure, as contrasted to three rich democracies where the co-operative business model has been more successful: Finland, France, and New Zealand.

The cause of co-operatives' comparative weakness in the United States is identified as reflecting the joint effect of economic liberalism and structural racism. Only in the United States did the co-operative face, in its initial development, two well-entrenched incumbents operating with competing ownership models: the investor-owned firm and the race-based chattel slavery system of ownership of people. Proponents of these two models acted to deprive the co-operative movement of resources, and undermined the solidarity at the co-operative business model's heart, splintering the American co-operative movement in the process. In subsequent waves of co-operative organizing, advocates have never fully succeeded in overcoming these initial obstacles, resulting in a different outcome in the United States, consistent with broader conceptions of the United States as a perennial outlier (i.e., ""American exceptionalism""). In contrast, in the successful cases, advocates were better able to leverage resources to animate a national solidarity and procure the necessary political and economic resources to achieve scale.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Anna O. Law presents a story of constitutional development that traces the confluence of the logics of slavery and settler colonialism in early legal rulings and public policy about migration and citizenship. The book examines the division of labor between the national and state governments that endured for over a century, reasons why that arrangement changed in the late nineteenth century, and what the transformation meant for people subject to those regimes of control. Drawing into one study the migration policy histories of groups of people that are usually studied separately, and combining the methodologies of political science, history, and law, Dr. Law reveals the unmistakable effects of slavery and Native American dispossession in modern US immigration policy. 

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University

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The book contends that the steady decline in interest rates around the world from 1980 to 2020 played a pivotal role in shaping five significant global trends during the same period: soaring debt levels, escalating housing prices, surging stock markets, widening economic inequality, and increased financial risk-taking.

The book also explores emerging factors likely to shape the future trajectory of interest rates. While demographic trends may keep rates low, other forces, such as rising public debt, can push them higher. The book offers its perspective on the interaction of these opposing trends, and presents its view on the future evolution of interest rates.

How Low Interest Rates Change the World is a no-nonsense fact-based book written in plain language. A key feature of the book is its empirical approach and reliance on data. Figures and tables richly illustrate and support the arguments presented, thereby inviting a broad audience to follow its fascinating journey into the evolution of interest rates and their impact.

Transcript ⁠here⁠

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Jue Liang queries these texts for their social and religious functions, especially where ambivalence and contradictions abound. However, these ambivalences do not necessarily disadvantage women in Tibetan Buddhism. Operating with ambivalent, sometimes competing, discourses on womanhood, Nyingma Buddhist theorists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created a space for a flexible treatment of gender, where they traverse between theological terms and embodied reality.

Ultimately, Conceiving the Mother of Tibet not only illuminates the unique position of Yeshe Tsogyel within Tibetan Buddhist literature but also offers a methodological framework for understanding localized theories of gender. This approach highlights alternative ways of being and acting in the world as embodied agents, providing valuable insights for the broader field of Buddhist studies.

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For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium--how it was farmed, refined, and used to build modern medicine and shape state power--has remained largely untold.
Drawing on archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the United States, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford UP, 2026) traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants in India, Turkey, and Australia to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource and a means of securing global stature. In postcolonial India, by contrast, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value amid the shifting currents of the Cold War. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon.
Markets of Pain reveals how a seemingly marginal crop became an unlikely engine of modernization, a tool of Cold War geopolitics, and a harbinger of today's global opioid crisis. Blending vivid scenes from opium's fields and factories with incisive analysis of scientific and diplomatic archives, Benjamin Robert Siegel recovers a buried history with urgent relevance for global supply chains, international power, and public health.

Markets of Pain offers an account of the global drug trade in the twentieth century, focusing on the transformation of opium from a colonial commodity into a modern resource for the American and European pharmaceutical industries. Challenging simplistic ideas of licit and illicit drugs in the twentieth century, it reveals how the modern global drug regime was formed by India and Turkey's navigation of the international anti-opium movement, the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, and the complex relationship between agriculture, medicine, and global capitalism.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Tune in as we speak with Justin Michael Reed, who offers a novel explanation in his recent book, The Injustice of Noah's Curse (Oxford UP, 2025)

Justin Michael Reed is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

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Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. Prichard describes anarchism as a lived set of practices, with a rich historical legacy, and shows how anarchists have inspired and criticised some of our most cherished values and concepts, from the ideals of freedom, participatory education, federalism, to important topics like climate change, and wider popular culture in science fiction. By locating the emergence and globalization of anarchist ideas in a history of colonialism and imperialism, the book links anarchism into struggles for freedom across the world and demonstrates that anarchism has much to offer anyone trying to envision a better future.

Alex Prichard is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter. His research on anarchism has shed new light on old problems of constitutional politics, order and anarchy in world order, and the history of international thought. He is the co-founder of the Political Studies Association specialist group for the study of anarchism, the Manchester University Press monograph series, Contemporary Anarchist Studies, and a trained chef.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Properly understood, 'pilot-wave theory' provides a deeper foundation for quantum mechanics, while also going beyond it. First proposed in the 1920s by French aristocrat and physicist Louis de Broglie, and revived in the 1950s by American physicist David Bohm, the theory posits hidden particle motions we cannot currently see or control. The theory is usually regarded as merely an alternative account of the same physics we already know. In fact, pilot-wave theory implies a wealth of new and radical physics beyond the reach of quantum mechanics.

Pilot-wave theory tells us that quantum physics is a special case of something broader and deeper. In more general 'nonequilibrium' conditions, Einstein's relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty break down. Superluminal signalling becomes possible, and quantum particles can be clearly seen and controlled. This new physics could have left traces in the early universe, and it might be visible today in radiation from exploding primordial black holes. Harnessing this new physics would have transformative technological implications, in particular for communication, cryptography, and computing.

Drawing intriguing parallels between the present era of quantum physics and past episodes of scientific confusion, this book tells the story of how pilot-wave theory was discovered and abandoned, revived and reconstructed, and how today it can pave the way to a new and radical physics beyond the quantum.

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Russell T. McCutcheon earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and is now an honorary life member of the International Association for the History of Religions. Beginning in 2001, he was the Department Chair at the University of Alabama, a role that he played for 18 years. His many publications on the history of the field and the practical effects of the category religion in liberal democracies, along with a number of resources created specifically for teachers and students, are widely used in the field today.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com00:00

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One of the most divisive issues in recent progressive politics has been what role, if any, allies might legitimately play in other people's movements. Despite the significance of this debate, it has taken place in a historical vacuum.
In Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, (Oxford UP, 2026) the Sixties historian Alice Echols explores what happened some sixty years ago when whites and Blacks came together in the fight against racism. She tells this story by focusing on two Black-led organizations that bookend the Sixties: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. In SNCC, whites were, in part, meant to generate a "white heat" so searing it would accelerate change. Results were mixed, and white activists formed new movements, from women's liberation to draft resistance.
By 1967, the Black Panther Party was advancing its own unique brand of "revolutionary nationalism," and seeking out white supporters. Partnering with whites brought the group visibility and resources, but it also put the Panthers at odds with other Black radicals, with unfortunate consequences.
Black Power, White Heat explains how solidarity lost credibility, and not just from within the movement. Here, the FBI played a key role, and so did the discourse of "radical chic," advanced most effectively by the journalist Tom Wolfe. Still, even as Black-white solidarity lost steam, it was not entirely played out. In some of the era's most important political trials, even courtrooms became sites of solidarity as predominantly white juries returned verdicts that suggested they trusted Black Panther defendants more than the District Attorneys prosecuting them. Clear-eyed about the difficulties of solidarity, Black Power, White Heat nonetheless emphasizes the achievements and considerable promise of uniting across difference, and in ways that will inform and deepen current debates roiling progressive politics.

Alice Echols is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is the author of numerous books, including Daring to Be Bad, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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By the fifteenth century, Constantinople had seen better days, but it was still a vibrant center of learning, worship, commerce, and information. 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople (Oxford UP, 2026) sketches the tense but exciting shared world of Italians, Turks, and Romans that was thrown into crisis by Mehmed II's decision to conquer the city. Kaldellis showcases a detailed reconstruction following events on a day-by-day basis, pulling from gripping eye-witness testimonies in Latin, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Turkish. He weighs the strategies of both the attackers and defenders, and proves that, contrary to the fatalism that marks almost all narratives written with hindsight, in reality the defense was hardly a lost cause. The defenders knew exactly what they were doing. They were willing to risk their lives, but it was not their intention to become martyrs. Instead, it was the sultan who was scrambling to neutralize a seemingly impregnable defense. That he did so was a testament to his ingenuity and tenacity.

The final chapters of 1453 trace the fate of the vanquished and their captivity. It also weighs the impact of the city's fall on the conquerors, the conquered, and on world history. 1453 was not merely a symbol for the passing of the Middle Ages and the onset of early modernity: it changed the very nature of the Ottoman empire and redirected the transmission of cultural legacies, especially those of Greek classical scholarship. The fall of Constantinople is therefore a nexus of converging pathways between east and west, medieval and modern, ends and beginnings.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This book argues that there exists a global humanities world which not only transcends disciplinary divisions but joins the professional academic humanities to a thriving amateur public humanities. This world has no essence, it is plural. Nevertheless, powerful, if contested, ethical orientations run through it and help shape it, including a will to truthfulness, a will to openness and generosity, a will to examine values.
In their essays Simon During and Amanda Anderson each bring different emphases to their shared orientation towards a large plural humanities world:
During analyses how key disciplines—sociology, philosophy and history—might be used to think about the humanities as a whole and, on this basis, offers some predictions of the future awaiting the humanities.
Anderson analyzes media representations of the humanities and considers the general conceptual frameworks through which the humanities focus on value and proffer critique. She analyses a series of examples of contemporary critical engagements in the humanities to press a case for value pluralism in the humanities and the university more broadly.

Amanda Anderson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She is the author, most recently, of Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (Oxford, 2018) and Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016). She previously served as the Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell and serves on the advisory board of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI).

Simon During, educated in New Zealand and at Cambridge, has taught at the University of Melbourne and Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of pioneering work in post-colonialism, cultural studies, and the history of entertainment but in recent years has concentrated on thinking about literature and the humanities under their difficult contemporary conditions

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Kessel explains that in examining sexual violence, what she found was multifaceted reflections and refractions, since the issue and the individual’s experience with sexual violence are neither simple nor linear. And the examples and case studies that make up the thrust of the book present this multidimensional nature of sexual violence. This multifaceted thinking about sexual violence also integrates an intersectional analysis, drawing on work from indigenous studies, feminist and women’s studies, feminist theory, black feminism, political theory and other connected schools of thought. The interrogation of rape and rape culture, particular in context of the political valence, “occurs across multiple axes of oppression, including white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, cisgender, settler colonial, and capitalist axes.”[1] The case study examples in Rape Fantasies include bathroom bills across the states, the idea of the frontier and modes of extraction, consent contracts and consent apps, and OnlyFans and intimacy on demand. Each example is deeply researched and unpacked, providing the reader with historical, legal, political, economic, cultural, and societal analyses of these complex areas of domination and entitlement.

Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence is an expansive undertaking, bringing together theoretical frameworks from different schools of thought and analysis, threaded with important case studies that help the reader think deeply about this concept and how it is operationalized in our daily lives. Even if we are not aware of these narratives, they surround us and shape so much of our thinking about how the world works. And why sexual violence remains so persistent.

Susan Liebell is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

Lilly J. Goren is a Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin. 

[1] Alisa Kessel. Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Oxford University Press, 2025. p. 6.

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Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals.

David-James Gonzales is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

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Through a careful analysis of the ancient sources, especially Caesar's own writings, David Potter offers us a stunning and original portrait of this great general and statesman. Master of Rome: A Life of Julius Caesar (Oxford UP, 2025) reveals Caesar as a highly organized manager with an extraordinary ability to adjust to circumstances while maintaining the ancient equivalent of a positive "media presence." After his death, Caesar's followers put forward a narrative of his life that made his rise to power seem inevitable, but Caesar's own writing tells us a different story—one of a detail-oriented general who demanded a high degree of accountability from his subordinates.
A critical aspect of Caesar's philosophy of command was the need to find room for former enemies to serve in his organization. While this philosophy catapulted Caesar to great fame as a general during the wars in Gaul, when he attempted to put this method into effect in the wake of the civil war that established him as the master of Rome, it led to his brutal assassination in 44 BCE.
Master of Rome tells the dramatic story of one of history's most intriguing figures, who rose from the fringes of Roman political society to unprecedented heights. Along the way, Potter identifies the extraordinary qualities that enabled Caesar to dominate the world in which he lived.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. His previous books include The Origin of Empire: Rome from the Republic to Hadrian, Constantine the Emperor, The Victor's Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, and Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Drawing on his new book, Josephus and Jesus (OUP, 2025), we discuss in this Part II of a two-part series the writings of the ancient historian Josephus and what they reveal about the historical identity of Jesus of Nazareth as well as the events surrounding the rise of early Christianity.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

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Marta Lorimer is a Lecturer in Politics at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University, where she teaches on European politics and populism, and co-editor of the journal Political Research Exchange. Her research on far-right politics and European integration has been published widely, including in the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

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In our conversation, Amir and I explore how Islamic philosophers like al-Ghazālī, al-Rāzī, al-Fārābi, and others navigated the relationship between reason and revelation, and how we might approach morally troubling passages in scripture today, including through an ethics-first approach. We also discuss thick and thin moral concepts, the Moses Principle, and what it means to reconcile modern moral sensibilities with ancient texts. Amir shares insights on gendered morality, the ethical significance of the Abraham story, and the broader implications of his work for progressive Muslims and theists alike.

This book is essential reading for readers interested in the ethics of interpretation, the challenges faced by contemporary religious communities when re-interpreting historical texts, theists wrestling with moral dilemmas, and anyone interested in the intersection of philosophy, religion, and ethics.

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Drawing on his new book, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (Oxford UP, 2025), we discuss in this Part I of a two-part series the stupendous life of Josephus, the ancient historian who lived in both elite Jewish and Roman circles his whole life, as well as the cultural, religious, and political world of the New Testament as found in his main works.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

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This highly original and innovative book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. Divided into two parts the book commences by demonstrating important commonalities between Foucault's ideas and those of a neglected 'post-modern' stream in liberal political and economic thought. These ideas draw on a social theory emphasising a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science highly critical of socio-economic 'scientism' and 'expert rule'; and an understanding of freedom as an open-ended process of 'self-creation' in the face of cultural power relations—a freedom threatened by alignments between state power and more decentred manifestations of power.
Part two combines the tools of Foucault's critical social theory with those of a post-modern liberalism to problematise four separate though overlapping 'bio-political' or 'pastoral' dispositifs in contemporary liberal societies focused on social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and law and order. Where the Foucauldian and the post-modern liberal approaches suggest that freedom requires a cultural and economic 'creative destruction' that destabilises existing modes of thought and ways of being, the pastoral dispositifs that seek to 'monitor and correct' multiple pattern anomalies are shown to stifle the space for that creative freedom.
Though the book does not engage the question of whether Foucault himself moved towards endorsing liberal political economy, it throws considerable light on how key Foucauldian concerns may be addressed within the liberal tradition, and why Foucauldians may have reason to embrace a reconstituted or post-modern liberalism

Mark Pennington has been Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King's College, University of London, since 2012, and is currently Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society. Prior to King's he taught for twelve years in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He has a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which one does not belong, or, for a group, to ‘sign’ its action as another group. Mimicry exploits the reputation of the model it mimics to avoid capture (flight), to strike undetected at the enemy (fight), or to hide behind or besmirch the reputation of the model group (‘false-flag’ operations). 

Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a theory and game-theoretic model of mimicry, an overview of its use through history, and a deep empirical exploration of its modern manifestations through several case studies by leading social scientists. The chapters cover mimicry in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, terrorism campaigns in 1970s Italy, the height of the Iraq insurgency, the Rwandan genocide, the Naxalite rebellion in India, and jihadi discussion forums on the Internet.

Thomas Hegghammer is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Nicholas Evan Sarantakes writes a comprehensive history of the fighting in The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Oxford UP, 2025)

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of four books, including Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press: 2010)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Battle of Manila. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.


Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.


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Our guest is Professor Jeff Knopf, a Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), where he serves as chair of the M.A. program in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Fatimah Williams, Ph.D., is an executive coach, speaker, and founder of Professional Pathways. A cultural anthropologist with over 15 years of consulting experience, she has advised organizations like the National Institutes of Health, the Urban League, and more than 30 colleges and universities on leadership development, organizational strategy, and career growth. Her thought leadership appears in both academic and popular outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and Essence. A former career services leader at the University of Pennsylvania, she also has served on the board of the University of Virginia Alumni Association and the advisory council of the Zimmerli Art Museum. She is the author of three books, Be Bold, Professional Pathways Planner, and her newest book, Options for Success, published by Oxford University Press, which guides PhDs through career transitions and the messy middle of reinvention.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Author Olivier Hein tackles the long history of Borneo in his latest book titled, appropriately, Borneo: The History of an Enigma (Hurst, 2025). He tackles Borneo’s indigenous communities; the spread of Hindu, Chinese, Muslim and European influence; the rise of the White Rajah; and how Borneo is treated by today’s modern nations.

A former diplomat with the UN, the OSCE and the UK, Olivier Hein has undertaken postings in Kosovo, Turkmenistan, the USA and France. He is also the author of Star and Key: The Historical Adventure of Mauritius and Mother of the World: The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan. He is also a regular contributor to The Chap magazine.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Borneo. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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The Politics of Perception explores both accurate perceptions as well as misperceptions about governmental institutions, and this is also where the research is truly fascinating. Part of what the research indicates is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the American public does not actually know a lot about politics or about how political institutions operate. At the same time, many citizens hold strong opinions or thoughts about politics, which generally are at odds with the lack of knowledge. This is also bound up with stereotypes that voters consider in terms of male and female elected officials and how they work within institutions. The Politics of Perception interrogates all of these misperceptions, unpacking the truth or reality versus the ideas that individuals hold about office holders and the political institutions in which those office holders work. Stauffer also discussed how she was able to build on a comparative politics approach, since parliamentary systems are, by their nature, collective institutions, and this approach helped to provide another theoretical framework for the analysis.

The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S. is an important and useful book for many different scholars: those who study American government and politics; scholars of gender and politics, especially in the United States; comparative political scientists; and political theorists exploring issues of representation and democracy.

We discussed the Ghost Bookstore in Athens, Georgia as a bookseller that can order The Politics of Perception for readers in Georgia or elsewhere.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Our guest Biko Koenig is an Assistant Professor in the Government and Public Policy programs at Franklin & Marshall college in Lancaster, PA. He is also co-founder of Research Action, a worker-owned research and organizing firm that performs research and analysis for unions, solidarity economy organizations, community groups and social justice campaigns. Trained as an ethnographer and qualitative specialist at the New School for Social Research, Koenig's research investigates questions of political behavior and mobilization that centers the experiences of everyday actors as they seek to challenge status-quo power relationships.

My co-host today is Joe Zerilli, and MA student in the Communication program at Oakland University.

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Guest Dr. Maud Bracke is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, and is also the author of Which Socialism? Whose Detente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 in 2007 and Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy (1968-1983) in 2014, as well as the co-editor of Translating Feminism: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, Place and Agency in 2021. In addition to authoring numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-editing several special issues of academic journalsb she is also an editor at the Journal of Modern European History and sits on various other editorial boards. 

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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In Sesame Street Around the World: Culture, Politics, and Transnational Organizational Partnerships (Oxford UP, 2025), Dr. Tamara Kay answers these questions using data from seven years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and 200 in-depth interviews with Sesame Workshop staff and international partners-including their real-time interactions-from seventeen countries within four regions around the world.

Dr. Kay argues that Sesame Workshop's secret is its engagement in coproduction, meaning it works with partners as a transnational team to create local Sesame Street programs together. Through coproduction, Sesame Workshop and its partners create new collective identities by constructing value to align their interests and exchanging complex cultural knowledge to both customize and build alliances. She traces the successive processes of coproduction, beginning with the imagination of the cultural product, to its disassembly, reconstitution, and dissemination. Coproduction privileges the creation of new knowledge that emerges from transnational interaction, and uses that new knowledge to create a hybrid cultural product. The Sesame Street case grapples with and illuminates culture in transnational interaction, providing insight into a range of other transnational organizational partnerships and different kinds of hybrid cultural products.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War (Oxford UP, 2025) describes how, faced with this immense challenge, the Allies devised a multilateral institution--the Wheat Executive--to do what no state could do alone. Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast examine the difficult considerations made by the allied powers when ceding authority to an international body that would make decisions for them. Beyond successfully managing wheat shipping and distribution, they argue, the Wheat Executive proved to have significant influence in the evolving landscape of interstate cooperation. As a case study, the Wheat Executive improves our understanding of international institutional design, the importance of commodities during wartime, economic coordination amongst wartime coalition members, and the legacies of international cooperation during the First World War. As one of the first great experiments in supranationalism, the Allies' management of wheat while at war provides lessons about the emergence of international organizations and their contours.

Jobie Turner is a military historian who studies logistics in warfare.  His most recent work is Feeding Victory:  Innovative Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh, 1755-1968 which discuss the impact of technology on transportation across three centuries of warfare.  Jobie is a retired Colonel in the USAF and a pilot for United Airlines

email: here 

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Zev Eleff is President and Professor of American Jewish history at Gratz College.

Roberta Rosenthal Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at DePaul University College of Law.

Chaim Saiman is Chair in Jewish Law at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks, Holy Rebellion: Religious Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism and Women's Rights in Israel (Brandeis University Press, 2024).
• Shari Rabin and Michael R. Cohen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of American Jewish History (Oxford University Press, 2025).
• Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, Remix Judaism: Preserving Tradition in a Diverse World (‎Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022).
• Chaim N. Saiman, Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law (Princeton University Press, 2018).
• Benjamin Steiner, Translating the Ketubah: The Jewish Marriage Contract in America and England (University Alabama Press, 2025).

Essays from the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law:

• Chapter 15: Chaim Saiman, “Formalism in Jewish Law.”
• Chapter 19: Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, “Lawmaking in the Conservative Movement: A Balance of Law and Norms.”
• Chapter 21: Arye Edrei, “The Impact of Zionism on Jewish Law.”
• Chapter 24: Rachel Levmore and Steven Gotlib, “Divorce and Agunah: Halakhic Responses to Modernity.”
• Chapter 30: Zev Eleff, “Judaism and the Modern Family.”

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ireland was England's oldest colony. How then did the English empire actually function in early modern Ireland and how did this change over time? What did access to European empires mean for people living in Ireland? This book answers these questions by interrogating four interconnected themes. First, that Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, Second, that the Irish operated as agents of empire(s). Third, Ireland served as laboratory in and for the English empire. Finally, it examines the impact that empire(s) had on people living in early modern Ireland.

What becomes clear is that colonisation was not a single occurrence but an iterative and durable process that impacted different parts of Ireland at different times and in different ways. That imperialism was about the exercise of power, violence, coercion and expropriation. Strategies about how best to turn conquest into profit, to mobilise and control Ireland's natural resources, especially land and labour, varied but the reality of everyday life did not change and provoked a wide variety of responses ranging from acceptance and assimilation to resistance.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks exacerbating food injustices, and risks negative outcomes for animals. If so, then maybe non-vegan food systems would be preferable to vegan food systems, if they could respect animal rights.

Could they? The author provides a rigorous analysis of the ethics of farming invertebrates, producing plant-based meats, developing cultivated animal products, and co-working with animals on genuinely humane farms, arguing that these possibilities offer the chance for a food system that is non-vegan, but nonetheless respects animals' rights. He argues that there is a way for us to have our cake, and eat it too, because we can have our cow, and eat her too.

Josh Milburn is a British philosopher and a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University. He has previously worked at the University of Sheffield, the University of York, and Queen's University (in Canada), before which he studied at Queen's University Belfast and Lancaster University. He is the author of Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022), and the regular host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals.

Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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Yet few people then or since encountered the "real" Walter Lippmann. That was because he kept crucial parts of himself hiding in plain sight. His extensive commentary on politics and diplomacy was bounded by his sense that America had to adjust to the loss of a common faith and morality in a "post-Christian" era. Over the course of his life, Lippmann traded in his fame as a happy secularist for the stardom of a grumpy Western Christian intellectual. Yet he never committed himself to any religious system, especially his own Jewish heritage.

Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor (Oxford University Press, 2023) considers the role of religions in Lippmann's life and thought, prioritizing his affirmation and rejection of Christian nationalisms of the left and right. It also yields fresh insights into the philosophical origins of modern American liberalism, including liberalism's blind spots in the areas of sex, race, and class. But most importantly, this biography highlights the constructive power of doubt. For Lippmann, the good life in the good society was lived in irreconcilable tension: the struggle to be free from yet loyal to a way of life; to recognize the dangers yet also the necessity of civil religion; and to strive for a just and enduring world order that can never be. In the end, Lippmann manufactured himself as the prophet of limitation for an extravagant American Century.

Mark Thomas Edwards is professor of US history and politics at Spring Arbor University in Michigan.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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After 9/11, the radical environmental movement was considered the number one domestic terror threat by the U.S. government. But by the end of the decade the movement had largely gone silent. What happened? And given the threat from climate, why haven't more radical tactics re-emerged?

In No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2026), Thomas Zeitzoff traces the origins, rise, fall, and potential rise again of the movement. Using in-depth interviews with past and current activists, as well as experts, Zeitzoff covers the main factions and actors. These include: Earth First! and its early advocacy for "monkeywrenching;" the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and his years-long anti-technology bombing campaign; the connections between animal liberation, punk, and the emergence of the Earth Liberation Front and its arson campaign; and more recent climate activists and their use of disruptive tactics. Along with providing a comprehensive overview of the movement and its various sub-movements that emerged over time, Zeitzoff also asks the bigger question-given the scope and threat from climate change why haven't activists escalated their tactics? Property destruction, sabotage, and even arson were once regular features of the movement in the 1990s and early 2000s--will activists use them again, or will they stick to non-violence? Will the threat of increasing state repression scare activists, or radicalize them?

Not just a history of a major extremist movement, this book tells the story of radical environmentalism and highlights how activists are confronting the dual threats of climate change and repression, and asking themselves how far they are willing to go to protect the planet.

Thomas Zeitzoff is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. His research focuses on political violence, social media, and political psychology.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2026) reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of the game by exploring both baseball's unusual features and the sport's many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, it abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play.

Instead, David M. Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. Here, we are shown how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.

David M. Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught courses on society and culture in nineteenth-century America for close to three decades.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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African Climate Futures (Oxford UP, 2025) shows how climate-changed futures are imagined in Africa and by Africans, and how these future visions shape political debates and struggles in the present. Scientific climate scenarios forecast bleak futures, with increased droughts, floods, lethal heatwaves, sea level rises, declining crop yields, and greater exposure to vector-borne diseases. Yet, African climate futures could also encompass energy transitions and socio-economic revolutions, transformed political agency and human subjectivities, and radically reparative more-than-human climate politics.

At the heart of the book is an original and interdisciplinary approach. It studies official climate policy strategies and fictional texts side-by-side, as ecopolitical imaginaries that envision low-carbon, climate-changed futures, and narrate pathways from 'here' to 'there'. It discusses net zero strategies from Ethiopia, The Gambia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe and draws on postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory, arguing that Africanfuturist climate fiction can inspire more radical, reparative, more-than-human ecopolitical imaginaries. These stories can help us to understand the debts we all owe, imagine what reparations might entail, and explore the contours of living convivially alongside more-than-human others in heterotopian, climate-changed futures.

Stories can help explore how we might feel in climate-changed futures and can help us to narrate a path through them. This book uses Africanfuturist climate fiction to inspire new ways of challenging and enriching theoretical debates in global climate change politics, including how we understand the places, temporalities, ecologies, and politics of climate futures. If we want to survive to tell new stories in liveable futures then we need to urgently and radically transform carboniferous capitalism.

Carl Death joined the University of Manchester in August 2013 as a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy, after four years in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, and a year in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. He has conducted research in South Africa, Tanzania and the USA, and has held visiting researcher positions at The MacMillan Centre for International and Area Studies and the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University; the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; Stellenbosch University; and the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.

Pauline Heinrichs is a Lecturer in War Studies (Climate and Energy) at King’s College London. Her research focuses climate and energy security. Pauline has worked with and led international teams in conflict and post-conflict countries such as Ukraine and the Baltic States, leading on qualitative methods and strategic narrative analysis. Pauline has also been a climate diplomacy professional working in foreign policy, and an international climate think tank.

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This is a book about far more than shopping. It is a history of technology, management, urban planning, consumer behaviour, and how everyday routines were quietly transformed in post-war Britain. Drawing on rare corporate archives, Godley and Salmon reveal how supermarkets were not inevitable but carefully designed organisations shaped by strategic choices, technological constraints, and shifting consumer expectations.

In the conversation, we explore how self-service reshaped labour and productivity, why Sainsbury’s distinctive commitment to fresh meat helped define the one-stop supermarket, and how planning initiatives such as the New Towns and Abercrombie’s vision for London influenced retail geography. We also discuss early experiments with computerised ordering, the limits of technological modernisation, and what Sainsbury’s story can—and cannot—tell us about the wider evolution of retailing in Britain and Europe.

Finally, Andrew reflects on the surprises hidden in corporate archives and what the history of supermarkets can teach us about today’s transformations—from online grocery shopping to automated checkouts.

If you have ever wondered how the modern supermarket came to be—and what it reveals about capitalism, technology, and everyday life—this episode is for you.

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But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic.

In Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape (Chelsea Green, 2026) Manchán Magan explores the enchantment, sublime beauty and sheer oddness of a 3000-year-old lexicon. Imbuing the natural world with meaning and magic, it evokes a time-honoured way of life, from its 32 separate words for a field, to terms like loisideach (a place with a lot of kneading troughs), bróis (whiskey for a horseman at a wedding), and iarmhaireacht (the loneliness you feel when you are the only person awake at cockcrow).

Told through stories collected from Magan’s own life and travels, Thirty-Two Words for Field is an enthralling celebration of Irish words, and a testament to the indelible relationship between landscape, culture and language.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Rather than a simple science-versus-religion clash, Langton reveals a rich and creative dialogue shaped by modernity, Jewish-Christian relations, and a distinctive Jewish tendency toward pan(en)theistic thinking—understanding God as deeply intertwined with an evolving universe. Together, Katz and Langton explore how Darwin forced Jewish thinkers to rethink creation, divine action, and morality, and how those debates continue to shape modern Jewish belief and identity.

Daniel Langton is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and a leading scholar of modern Jewish thought and Jewish-Christian relations. His work focuses on how Jews have engaged major intellectual movements of modernity, including science, philosophy, and theology.

Rabbi Marc Katz is a congregational rabbi, author, and teacher whose work bridges classical Jewish texts and contemporary cultural questions. He is the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life and writes widely on Judaism, ethics, and modern life.

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JL Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He did his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, resulting in the book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell, 1993), which introduced a new argument against the existence of a personal God known as the hiddenness argument.

…

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland.bsky.social

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Human Geography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Patricia Daley and Ian Klinke explains how the subject can aid a better knowledge of the modern world. It examines the formation of power systems and the ways in which they have been constructed, subverted, and resisted over time. This Very Short Introduction explores the topic through seven spaces that define the present: the colony, the pipeline, the border, the high rise, the workplace, the conservation area, and outer space. In addition, the authors take a critical view of the discipline and its history, but argue for its continuing vitality.

Patricia Daley is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa at University of Oxford.

Ian Klinke is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more -- or so we think. But what if all this is simply wrong? What if the benefits we assume science education produces turn out to be an illusion, nothing more than wishful thinking?

John L. Rudolph is Vilas Distinguished Achievement professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has affiliate appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Robert and Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and is the past editor-in-chief of the Wiley & Sons journal Science Education. Prior to his faculty appointment, he taught physics, chemistry, and biology in middle schools and high schools across Wisconsin.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Caroli, best-known for her work on presidential First Ladies, which has gone through multiple editions, will become the standard account of a truly remarkable life. Born in New England and educated in Boston and at the University of Berlin, Simkhovitch married a Russian intellectual seven years her junior who spoke no English and had no job prospects. Raising a family while working for her rapidly expanding set of causes, Simkhovitch was portrayed in a DC Comics series (also featuring Diana Prince) in the early 1940s as a "Wonder Woman of History" for her seeming ability to do it all: take on the full spectrum of urban ills while also raising and supporting her family. Her husband eventually joined the Columbia faculty and became a noted art collector, advising collectors such as J. P. Morgan, while she exposed the squalor of Downtown slums. The stress of trying to do it all took a heavy toll on Simkhovitch, but her lifelong, passionate advocacy of and contributions to housing reform continued unabated and remains both inspiring and relevant.

Betty Boyd Caroli is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MA in Mass Communication from Annenberg School of University of Pennsylvania, as well as a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. She studied at the Università Per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy, and the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. A Fulbright in Italy led her to teach at the British College in Palermo, the English School in Rome, and two branches of City University of New York (Queens College and Kingsborough Community College).

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. 

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus had taught contemplatives to close their eyes and withdraw into the soul. Most Christians followed his directions, but others dissented. In three critical episodes, an alternative model of Christian contemplation began to emerge: from Dionysius the Areopagite, to the Byzantine monks John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite, to eccentric humanists in medieval Paris. Together these episodes add up to a very different theological aesthetics, one that can enliven the modern study of mysticism and correct some of its imbalances. For in the centuries before the scientific revolution and the secularization of nature, Christians still saw God in the exterior world, not only the interior soul. God was not an ineffable and formless Absolute, immeasurable as the soul, but an infinite Measure who leaves behind geometrical traces in the figures of the world. The God who became a human body in the Incarnation not only entered time and matter, but also spatial extension, and with it the conditions of measure: points, lines, curves, shapes, planes, dimensions, and magnitudes.

Today the wisdom of this counter-tradition can strengthen the study of mysticism, not only by supplementing our contemporary fascination with negative theology by redefining what it means to name God positively, but by suggesting a new connection between Christian mysticism and the hyper-measured, hyper-technologized world that surrounds us.

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Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Christopher Lynch, PhD, is a musicologist and Head of the Theodore M. Finney Music Library in the University of Pittsburgh Library System, where he helps curate the Stephen Foster Memorial museum and archive. His research examines minstrelsy, popular song, and music theater as sites for contesting American ideals. He is co-editor of Listening Across Borders: Musicology in the Global Classroom and his work has been published in numerous journals.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body.

In Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford UP, 2023), author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West’s Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside?

In answering these questions, Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway’s inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.

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As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK.

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El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco (Oxford UP, 2025) delves into the complexities of Franco's character, exploring his volatile relationship with a domineering father, his traumatic experiences fighting in Morocco and the formation of his authoritarian ideology. The narrative follows Franco's ruthless leadership during the Civil War, his alignment with Hitler and Mussolini and the subsequent Cold War era that brought him international rehabilitation. Tremlett interrogates Franco's transformation of Spain through a lens that challenges the conventional view of him as a bumbling leader. Instead, he argues that Franco was a deliberate and pragmatic dictator who wielded terror to maintain an iron grip on power, and whose lasting (and most surprising) contribution was the period of peace that allowed Spain to challenge the absolutist spirit he embodied.
Nuanced and comprehensive, El Generalísimo offers a fresh perspective that reveals the intricate interplay of ambition and fearlessness of Francisco Franco; and examines his enduring legacy that continues to shape Spain's political and cultural landscape.

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She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Syracuse University in 2021. She also holds an M.Phil. in Religion and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women's and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, an M.A. in Comparative Religion from Iliff School of Theology, and a B.A. in English from the University of Minnesota Duluth.

She pursues projects that highlight the power and agency of everyday people. Religions are often a vital resource for grassroots social action and community engagement, as exemplified by Buddhism in Vietnam. Her projects have received generous grant support from the American Council of Learned Societies; Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship; Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA); and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies.

Swenson’s new book, Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2025) is one of the first major ethnographic studies on Buddhism in southern Vietnam, featuring new histories and interpretations of this rich subject.

It shares new context for how religious practices affect urban migration, development, and humanitarian concerns, and presents theoretical advancements for understanding grassroots charity. Near Light We Shine offers a diversity of perspectives on grassroots Buddhist practices throughout Vietnam, by featuring interviews that have never been published before from marginalized Buddhist practitioners in Vietnam, such as day laborers, queer men, elderly women, and retired communist soldiers.

References mentioned in the interview: 

1. Le Hoang Anh Thu, "Doing Bodhisattva's Work: Charity, Class, and Selfhood of Petty Traders in Hồ Chí Minh City" here
2. Nhung Lu Rots, "Towards an Alternative Buddhist Modernity: Hòa Hảo Charity Healing and Herbal Medicine in the Mekong Delta" here
3. Elizabeth Perez, Religion in the Kitchen here
4. Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) at the University of Wisconsin here
5. Van Nguyen-Marshall, Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954–1975 here
6. Casey R. Collins, Buddhist Contramodernism: Shinnyo-en's Reconfigurations of Tradition for Modernity here

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João Souto-Maior (website: here) is a postdoc at Stanford University.

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Sonia Hazard is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website here

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For readers interested in the link between quantum physics and relational metaphysics, please check out this recorded talk, especially Rovelli's linked here

You can also check out his book Helgoland. For a more detailed analysis of why substance metaphysics fail us, see, The Non-Existence of the Real World.

For readers interested in wuwei (non-coercive self-organizing communities in nature), please check out Honeybee Democracy, Biocivilisations, and FLUKE.

About the urgency of building a non-cruel optimism, check out the classic critique of neoliberal individualism: Cruel Optimism and Psychopolitics and Burnout society.

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After receiving a PhD in mathematics from MIT, Larry spent three decades working at prestigious companies in the tech industry. Initially he was not worried when he lost his job as part of a large layoff, but the prolonged unemployment that followed decimated his finances and nearly ended his marriage. Larry's story is not an anomaly. The majority of American workers experience unemployment, and millions get trapped in devastating long-term unemployment, including experienced workers with advanced degrees from top universities. How is it possible for even highly successful careers to suddenly go off the rails?

In The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed (Oxford UP, 2024), Ofer Sharone explains how the stigma of unemployment can render past educational and professional achievements irrelevant, and how it leaves all American workers vulnerable to becoming trapped in unemployment. Drawing on interviews with unemployed workers, job recruiters, and career coaches, Sharone brings to light the subtle ways that stigmatization prevents even the most educated and experienced workers from gaining middle-class jobs. Stigma also means that an American worker risks more than financial calamity from a protracted period of unemployment. One's closest relationships and sense of self are also on the line.

Eye-opening and clearly written, The Stigma Trap is essential reading for anyone who has experienced unemployment, has a family member or friend who is unemployed, or who wants to understand the forces that underlie the anxiety-filled lives of contemporary American workers. The book offers a unique approach to supporting unemployed jobseekers. At a broader level it exposes the precarious condition of American workers and sparks a conversation about much-needed policies to assure that we are not all one layoff away from being trapped by stigma.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Taylor's big screen credits span over fifty years, from her pre-adolescent debut in There's One Born Every Minute (1942) to her cameo in The Flintstones (1994). She worked steadily in everything from the biggest production in film history (Cleopatra in 1963) to a humble daytime TV soap opera (General Hospital in 1981). Each of her sixty-seven film appearances is recapped here with background on their inception, production, release, and critical and financial outcome. On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide is a cradle-to-grave chronology of Taylor's life, noting key events, achievements, and milestones. This book offers a work-by-work analysis of her entire career told in chronological order, each film headlined with year of release, distributing studio, and director. This in-depth overview provides an invaluable new way of understanding Taylor's full life and work, as well as the history and nuances of the film industry as it existed in the twentieth century.

Kennedy engagingly reassesses Taylor's acting and the nuances she brought to the screen - this includes a consideration of her specific art, the development of her voice, her relationship to the camera, and her canny understanding of the effect she had on audiences worldwide. Kennedy also provides an elucidating guide to her entire filmography, one that speaks to the quality of her performances, their contours and shading, and their context within her extraordinary life and career. On Elizabeth Taylor is a beautifully comprehensive overview of a singular actress of the twentieth century, offering new ways to see and appreciate her skill and peerless charisma, in turn placing her among the greatest film stars of all time.

Matthew Kennedy is a film historian based in Oakland, California. He is the author of Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, biographies of actresses Marie Dressler and Joan Blondell, and of director-screenwriter Edmund Goulding. He has introduced film series at the Museum of Modern Art, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Pacific Film Archive, and written for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Turner Classic Movies, and the National Film Registry. He is currently host and curator of the CinemaLit series at the Mechanics' Institute Library in San Francisco.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and

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English playwrights depict Persia and its legendary monarchs, such as Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, and Darius, as alternative figures of cosmopolitanism in the period. By focusing on an archive of plays of Persia staged between 1561 and 1696 in conversation with Shakespeare's works, European peace proposals, legislative acts of toleration, and global traditions of hospitality found in Zoroastrianism, Islam, and the Judeo-Christian traditions, this book pioneers an interdisciplinary methodology, introduces Persianate conceptual lenses for literary analysis of English literature, and constructs capacities to imagine multiple globalities existing in early modernity through a spectrum of imagined and lived experiences on stage and on the ground.

Sheiba Kian Kaufman is an Assistant Professor of English at Saddleback College and Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of articles on Shakespeare, Persia, and early modern English drama. She has received fellowships from the UCLA Center for 17th-and 18th Century Studies, Clark Library, the UCI Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, the UCI Center in Law, Society, and Culture, Somerville College, Oxford, and the American Association of University Women.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades but the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, it also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of western Europe and the Muslims of the Middle East, and compares relations between Latin Christians and Muslims with relations between Muslims and other Christian groups.

Helen J. Nicholson is Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published extensively on the crusades, the military orders, and various related subjects, including a translation of a chronicle of the Third Crusade and an edition of the Templar trial proceedings in Britain and Ireland. She has just completed a history of Queen Sybil of Jerusalem (1186-1190).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis

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Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries.

Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

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In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race. 

An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficiency, she pivoted from the elite amateur tennis circuit to State Department-sponsored goodwill tours, attempts to find success as a singer and Hollywood actress, the professional golf circuit, a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters and her own professional tennis tour, coaching, teaching children at tennis clinics, and a stint as New Jersey Athletics Commissioner. As she struggled to support herself in old age, she was left with disappointment, recounting her past achievements decades before female tennis players were able to garner substantial earnings.

A compelling life and times portrait, Serving Herself offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of a fiercely independent trailblazer who satisfied her own needs and simultaneously set a pathbreaking course for Black athletes.

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Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of colonialism to the pan-European movement that grew out of the first world war and peace project (or was it?) that emerged from the second.

Not only is pro-Europeanism “analogous to nationalism - something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale," Kundani argues, but the EU itself has “become a vehicle for imperial amnesia" thereby promoting and privileging “whiteness”.

Hans Kundnani is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations Workshop, an associate scholar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and a visiting scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research. From 2018-22, he was a full-time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe Programme. Before that, he was a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, the Transatlantic Academy, and the European Council on Foreign Relations. In 2014, he published The Paradox of German Power.

*The author's own book recommendations are Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006 - first published in 1956)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism offers case studies of four organisations which incorporated such complicated entanglements of knowledge and power: the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie in Munich, the Special Department India of the German Foreign Ministry, the Seminar for Oriental languages and its successor institutions at the University of Berlin, and the Indian Legion of the German Army. The knowledge networks underlying these organisations were dominated by German Indologists, but non-specialist knowledge providers, both German and Indian were also included.

The Nazi regime expected all scholars and intellectuals to engage in Kulturpolitik (cultural politics), which entailed propagating the glories of the 'Reich' and its supreme leader as well as collecting 'politically valuable' knowledge within and outside Germany. For the four organizations concerned, this meant conducting pro-German and from around 1938, anti-British propaganda aimed at Indians.

Loosely following an analogy provided by Herbert Mehrtens in the context of natural sciences, this monograph posits that there were ‘patterns of collaboration’ between the knowledge providers and the representatives of the Nazi regime. At the core of these 'patterns' was, to borrow Mitchell Ash’s theory, an exchange of resources and capital in which scholars and experts offered their knowledge of Indian languages, history and culture to authorities like the Foreign Ministry, the SS and the Army. In return, they received increased professional opportunities, financial remuneration or in some cases, increased power and influence.

Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.

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The second part of the book traces the evolution of Congress, which first experimented with radical decentralization in the 1970s and then, beginning in the 1980s, embraced powerful leadership and ideological caucuses that prioritized partisan unity and electoral confrontation. This transformed institution has been unable to work through the country's deep divisions on contemporary issues like immigration or the COVID-19 pandemic. Contemporary policymaking often circumvents Congress entirely. In other instances, Congress is engaged, but it proceeds without any bipartisan cooperation or through leader-broken compromises generated by crises. Each of these patterns creates serious difficulties for legitimating American policy. The book concludes with three scenarios for Congress's future. Without significant change, the institution will sink into decrepitude. But it could still be transformed, either by progressive constitutional reform empowering the president at the legislature's expense, or by a revival of meaningful deliberation and debate facilitated by the renewal of the committee system.

Philip A. Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies America's separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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The aim of Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2023) is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women.

Alison Stone is a British philosopher. She is a Professor of European Philosophy in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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In Critique of Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial accomplishment of political independence or self-determination in Ghana. He argues that political independence is insufficiently a decolonial claim because it is framed within the context of a country, where a permanent colonial settlement was never deemed necessary for the consolidation of future colonial political obligations. So, while territorial dissolution was politically engineered by Ghanaians, the colonial merely reconstitutes itself in different legal and ideological forms.

Forjwuor offers new methodological, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to engaging the questions of colonialism, political independence, political decolonization, justice, and freedom, and constructs multiple conceptual bridges between traditional disciplinary fields of inquiry including politics, history, law, African studies, economic history, critical theory, and philosophy and political theory. Using the Ghanaian experience as a rich case study, Forjwuor rethinks what colonialism and decolonization mean, and asserts that decolonization is primarily a question of justice.

Bernard Forjwuor is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is a scholar of black political thought, and his research focuses on the philosophical, critical, and theoretical claims advanced by global black political thinkers. His recent work challenges the ways the colonial and the racial are routinely affirmed as extinguished in the liberal democratic affirmation of sovereignty.

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As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practicing meditation, for example, than claiming Buddhist identity. A century ago, this would have been unthinkable. So how did Buddhism come to claim such a significant place in the American cultural landscape?

The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford UP, 2023) offers an answer, showing how in the years on either side of World War II second-generation Japanese American Buddhists laid claim to an American identity inclusive of their religious identity. In the process they-and their allies-created a place for Buddhism in America. These sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants-known as “Nisei,” Japanese for “second-generation”-clustered around the Berkeley Bussei, a magazine published from 1939 to 1960. In the pages of the Bussei and elsewhere, these Nisei Buddhists argued that Buddhism was both what made them good Americans and what they had to contribute to America-a rational and scientific religion of peace.

The Making of American Buddhism also details the behind-the-scenes labor that made Buddhist modernism possible. The Bussei was one among many projects that were embedded within Japanese American Buddhist communities and connected to national and transnational networks that shaped and allowed for the spread of modernist Buddhist ideas. In creating communities, publishing magazines, and hosting scholarly conventions and translation projects, Nisei Buddhists built the religious infrastructure that allowed the later Buddhist modernists, Beat poets, and white converts who are often credited with popularizing Buddhism to flourish. Nisei activists didn't invent American Buddhism, but they made it possible.

Dr. Victoria Montrose is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Furman University.

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Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sara Byala is the first assessment of the social, commercial and environmental impact of one of the planet's biggest brands and largest corporations, in Africa. Dr. Byala charts the company's century-long involvement in everything from recycling and education to the anti-apartheid struggle, showing that Africans have harnessed Coca-Cola in varied expressions of modernity and self-determination: this is not a story of American capitalism running amok, but rather of a company becoming African, bending to consumer power in ways big and small.

In late capitalism, everyone's fates are bound together. A beverage in Atlanta and a beverage in Johannesburg pull us all towards the same end narrative. This story matters for more than just the local reasons, enhancing our understanding of our globalised, integrated world. Drawing on fieldwork and research in company archives, Dr. Byala asks a question for our time: does Coca-Cola's generative work offset the human and planetary costs associated with its growth in the twenty-first century?

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Contrary to the producers’ oft-publicized claims of Sesame Street’s universality, the show was heavily shaped by a fixed set of assumptions about childhood, education, and commercial entertainment. This made sales difficult as Sesame Street met both skepticism and direct hostility from foreign television producers who did not share these ideals. Drawing on insights from new histories about childhood, education, and transnational media, the book lays bare a cultural clash of international proportions rooted in divergent approaches to children's television. In doing so, it provides a reflective backdrop to the many ongoing debates about children's media.

In contrasting the positive receptions and renunciations of Sesame Street, Jensen demonstrates that it was only after a substantial rethinking of Sesame Street’s aims and business model that this program ended up on numerous broadcasting schedules by the mid-1970s. Along the way, this rethinking and the constant negotiations with potential international buyers created and shaped the business and corporate brand that paved the way for the Sesame Street we know today.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Throughout How Documentaries Work (Oxford University Press, 2023), excerpts from interviews with documentary producers, directors and craftspersons help to illuminate the concepts and deliver behind-the-scenes insights. It contains examples from over 100 contemporary documentaries and covers a wide variety of contemporary non-fiction work, including docu-series, television documentaries, unscripted series, and contemporary avant-garde documentaries.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University and an Associate Faculty member at University of Arizona Global Campus. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Decades before the Nazi persecution of the Jews would emerge as a master moral paradigm of evil in popular culture, the constructed Antisemite became part of a forceful narrative structure that allowed stereotypes about Jews to persist, even as explicit antisemitism became taboo. Lisa Silverman examines the crucial development and implications of the figural Antisemite in a range of trials, films, and texts during the first years after the end of the Second World War. She argues that, in their economically shattered, emotionally exhausted, and culturally impoverished postwar world, Austrians, Germans, and others used the Antisemite as a way to come to terms with their altered circumstances and to shape new national self-understandings. 

A readily recognizable and easily adaptable figure of evil, the Antisemite loomed large as a powerful and persistent trope in a wide range of artistic and cultural narratives. As a figure onto which to project or imagine as a source of the hatred of Jews, the Antisemite allowed audiences to avoid facing the implications of crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices and to deny the endurance of widespread and often coded antisemitic prejudices. In postwar Europe, where everyone looked to blame others for the murder and dispossession of the Jewish population, the authority to define the Antisemite as a receptacle for explicit Jew-hatred became a powerful force. As The Postwar Antisemite argues, antisemitism as a hidden code gained new force, packing stronger, more effective punches and affording its users more power. This era is critical to understanding ongoing struggles over the authority to set the parameters of antisemitism and the power and persistence of this hatred in society.

Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Smith is well known for his research focused on religion, adolescents and emerging adults, and social theory. He has written many books, including Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (with Michael O. Emerson), as well as Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (with Melinda Lundquist Denton).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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This book presents Gregory of Nyssa's On the Six Days of Creation (In Hexaemeron) as a specimen of Early Christian philosophy. It comprises Gregory of Nyssa's text in its Greek original accompanied by a new English translation, and seven accompanying essays by international specialists from diverse backgrounds. Each essay focuses on a section of the text and the arising philosophical issues. The essays complement each other in offering multiple perspectives on how Gregory's text may be approached philosophically and positioned in relation to other, more or less contiguous, philosophical theories, including the early Greeks Anaxagoras and Empedocles, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Rather than presenting a definite and exhaustive state of the art study of Gregory's text, this volume aims to open new pathways for research into In Hexaemeron.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Johannes Zachhuber is professor of historical and systematic theology at Oxford. His books include Human Nature in Greogry of Nyssa, The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics, and Time and the Soul: from Aristotle to Augustine.

Anna Marmodoro is Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University. She’s written or edited half a dozen books including Metaphysics: an Introduction; Forms and Structures in Plato’s Metaphysics; Aristotle on Perceiving Objects, and most recently she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Omnipresence.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Peace A. Medie is an award-winning scholar and a writer. She is associate professor in politics at the University of Bristol. She studies state and non-state actors’ responses to gender-based violence and other forms of insecurity in countries in Africa. She is author of ‘Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa’ (OUP 2020). Her debut novel, His Only Wife, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and a Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020. Her second novel, Nightbloom, will be published in June 2023.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

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Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash.

Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation.

Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Yet the very idea of Rome having a grand strategy, or what it might be, did not concern historians until Edward Luttwak wrote The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third forty years ago. Although the work generated much debate, it failed to win over many ancient historians, in part because of its heavy emphasis on military force. By mostly neglecting any considerations of diplomacy, economics, politics, culture, or even the changing nature of the threats Rome faced, Luttwak tells only a portion of what should have been a much more wide-ranging narrative.

For this and other reasons, such as its often dull presentation, it left an opportunity for another account of the rise and fall of Rome from a strategy perspective. Through a more encompassing definition of strategy and by focusing much of the narrative on crucial historical moments and the personalities involved, Rome: Strategy of Empire (Oxford UP, 2022) promises to provide a more persuasive and engaging history than Luttwak's. It aims not only to correct Luttwak's flaws and omissions, but will also employ the most recent work of current classical historians and archeologists to present a more complete and nuanced narrative of Roman strategic thinking and execution than is currently available.

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Though the injustices of our world seemingly require some kind of policing, the police are often sources of injustice themselves. But this is not always the result of intentionally or negligently bad policing. Sometimes it is an unavoidable result of the injustices that emerge from interactions with other social systems. This raises an important question of just policing: how should police respond to the injustices built into the system? Just Policing attempts an answer, offering a theory of just policing in non-ideal contexts.

Monaghan argues that police discretion is not only unavoidable, but in light of non-ideal circumstances, valuable. This claim conflicts with a widespread but inchoate view of just policing, the legalist view that finds justice in faithful enforcement of the criminal code.

But the criminal code leaves policing seriously underdetermined; full enforcement is neither possible nor desirable. Police need an alternative normative framework for evaluating and guiding their exercise of power.

Just Policing critiques popular approaches to police abolitionism while defending normative limits on police power. The book offers a defense of police discretion against common objections and evaluates controversial issues in order maintenance, such as the policing of "vice" and homelessness, democratic control over policing, community policing initiatives, police collaborations and alternatives like mental health response teams, and possibilities for structural reform.

Jake Monaghan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. His research is primarily in moral and political philosophy.

He is interviewed by Tom McInerney, an international lawyer, scholar, and strategist, who has worked to advance rule of law and development internationally for 25 years. He has taught in the Rule of Law for Development Program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law since 2011. He writes the Rights, Regulation and Rule of Law newsletter on Substack.

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The book argues that SFA in the Sahel is driven not just by regional security threats, such as insurgency, violent extremism, and transnational crime, but also by external actors' strategic interests. Through a comparative analysis of bilateral (France, U.S.) and multilateral (EU, UN) initiatives, it demonstrates how SFA has been framed as the primary policy tool to manage instability. Securitizing the Sahel offers both theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding SFA in fragile states. It challenges prevailing frameworks, provides critical insights for policymakers, and highlights the unintended consequences of militarized external assistance in the Sahel and beyond.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Professor Shatema Threadcraft is the Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Shatema continued their conversation.

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In Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Joseph P. Viteritti tells the definitive history of the school choice movement. In the 1990s, school choice emerged as an effort by a coalition of Black activists and conservative lawmakers seeking to offer economically disadvantaged students of color a way out of failing schools. As Viteritti shows, however, today's movement--championed by Republicans, conservatives, and faith-based organizations--has become less about placing disadvantaged children in better schools and more about providing public funding to students, irrespective of income, attending private--and frequently religious--schools.

Viteritti, an education insider and supporter of school choice for underserved students, profiles six influential figures, the "radical dreamers," who were integral to understanding the movement for greater education equality and the role that choice can play in fully realizing the movement's potential. Radical Dreamers urges us to have an honest conversation about education in America and where we have gone wrong. Viteritti's compelling narrative of how some of the most passionate educators conceived of school choice provides a valuable context to our nation's long struggle to offer every child in America a good education, and how that goal was undermined by advocates on both the left and right.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. 

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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For a 30% discount on Dr. Mendez’s The Gospel of John: A New History from Oxford University Press, use code AUFLY30.

Hugo Méndez (Ph.D., University of Georgia, 2013) is Associate Professor in Ancient Mediterranean Religions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches New Testament and Early Christianity. His research interests include the Gospel and Epistles of John and the reception of biblical texts, figures, and images in late antiquity. He has published multiple books, including The Cult of Stephen in Jerusalem (Oxford UP, 2022) and the most recent edition of a popular introductory textbook about The New Testament (8th ed.; Oxford UP, 2023), co-authored with Bart D. Ehrman. His research has also been featured in the Journal of Biblical Literature, the Journal of Early Christian Studies, and New Testament Studies, among other prominent venues, and in his spare time, he enjoys cooking and spending time outdoors with his family. For more on Hugo’s work and research interests, visit his website at https://www.hugomendez.com/.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books/Bloomsbury, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Prague is the first English-language book to trace the history of the city from the tenth century to the present. Cynthia discusses her personal connection to Prague, highlights key moments in the city’s history, and shares a few tips for those planning to visit.

You can purchase the book from Oxford University Press here.

The CEU Review of Books Podcast Series explores the questions that affect us all through in-depth talks with researchers, policy makers, journalists, academics and others. We showcase the most current research linked to Central Europe through these discussions.

At the CEU Review of Books, we encourage an open discussion that challenges conventional assumptions to foster a vibrant debate.

Visit our website to read our latest reviews, long reads and interviews.

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Before and after independence, Indian notions of the international realm as a sanctified space were shaped by migrant journeys; this was a space of anxiety in which to negotiate the ‘coolie stain’ on the country’s reputation. Discourse was defined by intersections of caste, class, race and gender—and framed the migrant worker as the quintessential ‘other’ of Indian diplomacy.

Drawing on rich, multi-archival analysis spanning the vast geographies of labour migration, Kalathmika Natarajan pieces together the stories of quarantine camps en route to Ceylon; cultural and educational missions in the Caribbean; discretionary passport policies in India; and the mediation of immigrant life in Britain. The result is a nuanced history from the interwar period to the decades after independence, and a critical analysis centring both caste and the negotiation of ‘undesirable’ mobility as foundational to Indian diplomacy.

About the Author: 

Kalathmika Natarajan is Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of Exeter. Her interdisciplinary research combines critical approaches to diplomatic history and South Asian migration. She has worked at the University of Edinburgh, and received her doctoral degree from the University of Copenhagen.

About the Host: 

Stuti Roy works at Oxford University Press and is a recent graduate with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

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Through empirical analyses and interviews with buyers and sellers of professional services, Sytch reveals the conditions under which supplier-induced demand is most likely to occur. The book argues that the conditions that give rise to supplier-induced demand are increasingly characteristic of today's broader knowledge-based economy

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Elif Kalaycioglu is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at The University of Alabama.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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Author Janice Ross posits the Halprins' 1950s iconic mid-century modern home and expansive outdoor dance deck as a hidden archive. She explores four objects from their house and gardens -- staircase, deck, chair, and window -- to trace how, despite the conservative postwar climate, this intimate domestic space became a radical template reshaping postmodern dance invention and its expansion into civic, social, and environmental engagement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The work that happened in this white, middle class, Jewish-American home in a San Francisco suburb paved the way for changes that continue to resonate today across contemporary dance, performance, and urban design. These include: defamiliarizing urban landscape and gardens as cloistered theaters where civic identities are rehearsed, orchestrating collective problem solving and invention, normalizing the nude body, privileging a utilitarian and responsive rather than sentimental approach to dance in the environment, and re-positioning choreography as a vital medium for urban problem solving.

These four representative objects in the Halprin home are also used to trace the burgeoning of dance as a forceful medium for civic engagement, and its valorization of the ordinary in movement. As a whole, this book shows how dance, architecture, and landscape design would have a profound confluence through these shared domestic spaces and objects of the Halprins' lives.

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In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineers and iron-makers in Virginia to collaborate with railroad and sugar entrepreneurs in Cuba.

Through his examination of the creation of these industrial bodies of knowledge, Daniel B. Rood demonstrates the deepening dependence of the Atlantic economy on forced labor after a few revolutionary decades in which it seemed the institution of slavery might be destroyed. The reinvention of this plantation world in the 1840s and 1850s brought a renewed movement in the 1860s, especially from enslaved people themselves in the United States and Cuba, to end chattel slavery.

This account of capitalism, technology, and slavery offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Americas.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Kenneth G. Appold, James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History, Princeton Theological Seminary.

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As this book demonstrates, Julian offers an Iamblichean approach to the exegesis of the legends of Rome's founding, the allegories of Plato's dialogues, and myths of his own creation in order to articulate his own role in the refounding of the Empire. Furthermore, argues Jeremy Swist, approaching the wider examination of Julian's imperial self-image on these terms ends up nuancing and challenging common assumptions influenced by the rhetoric of his contemporary proponents. In his reverence for the gods and for philosophy, the emperor's self-construction embraces the identities of a statesman and soldier more than of a philosopher, of a Roman more than a Greek, and of a mere human rather than a semi-divine being. While distancing himself from the ideal models of philosophical virtue and imperial founding that inspire his own actions, he adopts a different set of exemplary figures as mirrors of himself.

New Books in Late Antiquity is sponsored by Ancient Jew Review

Jeremey Swist is Assistant Professor of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University. Click here for The Symposium of the Caesars, and here for his talk on Julian and Constantinople. His dissertation spotlight from AJR is here.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston.

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The Color of Civics pulls together a variety of forms and kinds of research methodology to understand what happens in classrooms and how students learn and see themselves within this fabric of American democracy. Using qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic approaches, Nelsen weaves together robust data to explore what makes diverse impacts within the classrooms, especially within a big, urban public school system. Part of what is teased out in this research is the potential longevity of political socialization that transpires at an early age among students—this is a key dimension of citizenship, creating in individuals an understanding of their role and capacities within a democracy. The ability to teach about social movements, and political movements, and the individuals who were involved in these movements expands the concept of citizen participation in American politics and thus expands the notion of citizenship in general. This approach also moves beyond the “great man” narrative of history and helps students to think about how various people engage in politics, not just by running for elected office. Nelsen’s work is important and useful as we continue to consider how citizens can and should participate in American politics and how the next generation is taught about citizenship, the American republic, and the idea of a complex democracy.

This book may be acquired at Books and Books in Miami, Florida, at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, IL, and at Women & Children First Bookstore in Chicago, IL.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University, and co-host of the New Books in Political Science. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Sage and Volume II: Into the Multiverse (UP Kansas, 2022 & 2025), as well as co-editor of Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (UP Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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In Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2025), Aileen Teague chronicles a largely ignored but critical prehistory of intensified bilateral antidrug efforts by exploring their origins and inherent contradictions in Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s, US leaders externalized their aggressive domestic drug control practices by forcing junior partners such as Mexico into adopting their policies. Leaders on both sides of the border situated counternarcotics within a larger paradigm of militarized policing, which increased the power and influence of the military and aggressive counternarcotics in both countries. However, different security imperatives motivated US and Mexican agents, complicating enforcement in Mexico. Between 1969 and 2000, Mexico's embrace of America's punitive antidrug policies strengthened the coercive capacities of the Mexican state, exacerbated crime, and were so ineffective in an era of open trade blocs that they hastened the expansion of the drug trade.

Drawing on such sources as records from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US State Department, interviews with key officials, accounts from Mexican journalists, and rarely seen Mexican intelligence reports, Teague relates the war on drugs as a transnational story with deep historical roots in US and Mexican conceptions of policing and security. The negative impacts of US-led counternarcotics policies in Mexico can be attributed to the complex relationship between the United States' and Mexico's shared approach to the drug war--with critical implications for present-day relations.

Aileen Teague is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a former Marine Corps officer and a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Professor Rehan Abeyratne is is Professor and Associate Dean (Higher Degree Research) at Western Sydney University School of Law, where he teaches Government and Public Law, Legal Research and Methodology, and Comparative Law: Legal Systems of the World. He also coordinates the School of Law's Honours Program. Professor Abeyratne holds a PhD from Monash University, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BA (Hons.) in Political Science from Brown University. He researches comparative constitutional law and has published several books and articles in world leading journals. Most of Prof. Abeyratne's research can be freely accessed on SSRN, Academia, and Google Scholar.

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In Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford UP, 2024), Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert shows how nineteenth-century French liberals championed the idea of "political capacity" as an alternative to democratic political rights and argued that voting rights should be limited to capable citizens who would preserve free, stable institutions against revolutionary passions and democratic demands. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to something that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all.
Understandably, scholarly treatments of political capacity have criticized the idea as exclusionary and potentially dangerous. Englert argues instead that political capacity was a flexible standard that developed alongside a changing society and economy, allowing liberals to embrace democracy without abandoning their first principles. She reveals a forgotten, uncharted path of liberalism in France that remained open to political democracy while aiming to foster citizen capacity. Overall, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the "new democracy" to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them.

Gianna Englert is Associate Professor of Humanities in The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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