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The American Revolution occurred at a time when Britain’s constitutional order failed to adapt to the extraordinary growth of its colonies. The framers designed an American constitution to succeed where Britain’s had faltered, planning for continuous population and territorial expansion that would eventually cross the continent. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, it was already ill-suited for an increasingly urban, industrialized society, and the transformations of the twentieth century have pushed it to a breaking point. This book charts the history and aims of the American constitution from its origins in an agrarian past to the grave crisis we face today.

Mark Peterson traces the American constitutional tradition to the control of land in medieval England, showing how the founders incorporated the aspirations of Magna Carta with the administrative principles of the Domesday Book, a meticulous survey and valuation of landed property commissioned by William the Conqueror. This framework encouraged the growth of democratic self-government in a young nation. It also institutionalized the colonization of territory and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, establishing a legal blueprint for transforming tribal lands into revenue-yielding real estate for settlers. Peterson’s riveting narrative paints an arresting picture of a dynamic republic whose frame of government has changed enormously to meet the challenges of the modern age but whose written constitution has changed very little.

Marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution reveals how this widening disconnect threatens the very existence of our democracy. It calls for a constitution that sustains the ideals developed over the past thousand years while meeting the challenges of the future.

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Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.

Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?.

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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—Harry Cleaver, “Work Is Still the Central Issue: New Words for New Worlds,” in Points of Departure, ed. Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter, p. 35.

What changes if we begin the history of capitalism not with what capital does to workers, but with what workers force capital to do?

This reversal helps set Harry Cleaver’s approach to Marxism apart from more traditional accounts of capitalism and labor. In Points of Departure: Refusal of Work and the Crisis of Capitalism, editors Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter bring together Cleaver’s writings from several decades, including hard-to-find and previously untranslated work.

The first volume in Common Notions’ new Class Compositions series presents Cleaver’s work not simply as theory, but as a practical way of making sense of everyday struggles from the worker’s standpoint. The refusal of work, unwaged labor, class composition, capitalist crisis, and self-valorization take on renewed significance amid contemporary struggles over work and organization. Greek and Turkish translations are also in the works.

Listeners may know Cleaver from his landmark 1979 book Reading Capital Politically. For more than five decades, he has helped develop what became known as autonomist Marxism, an approach that places working-class self-activity at the center of its analysis. In this interview Ovetz and Van Meter discuss the traditions from which his work emerged, and what they hope a new generation of readers might do with it in their search for alternatives.

Although more conventional accounts of political economy often begin with companies restructuring workplaces, introducing new technologies, moving investment, or tightening workplace discipline. Cleaver instead, turns the perspective around by asking what forms of worker resistance may have compelled capital to make those changes in the first place.

That reversal in turn raises questions the editors grapple with, such as: How do everyday acts of resistance become collective power? How can we demonstrate that corporate restructuring is actually a response to worker resistance, and what might other approaches add to or supplement Cleaver’s inversion of class perspective? And when workers create organizations of their own, how can those institutions preserve autonomy without hardening into less responsive bureaucracies?

Drawing on concepts like workers’ inquiry, workplace cooperation, self-valorization, cooperatives, as well as the significance of Zapatistas, we consider what it means to move beyond refusing existing forms of work toward creating new forms of collective life.

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By demonstrating how truth commissions turn to international law for authority, the book shows how this produces an official account of past violence and promises of future community, which fundamentally affects how communities live together in the aftermath of violent conflict.

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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Matthew Engelke is professor and chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University.

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

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The answer is to make a conjecture: an educated guess that discourses on what is likely the case. Historical examples range from Italian humanists stealing manuscripts from monasteries and reconstructing classical languages, to Jesuit missionaries speculating about land bridges to the Americas, and even Renaissance magicians pioneering in alchemy and astrology.

This collective practice is called “conjectural history,” and its roots go far back. But how far back? To answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest, Professor Anthony Grafton.

A former president of the American Historical Association, and the Emeritus Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, Grafton is a scholar of early modern Europe and written history, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, and the author of many books such as The Footnote (1997) and Magus (2023). Today, we will discuss his current project on “conjectural history.”

We discuss the use of conjectural versus counterfactual history, its founders in Herodotus and Thucydides, and proponents like the explorer Jose de Acosta, S.J. and the scholar Lorenzo Valla. Also discussed are Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the birth of modern science from renaissance magic, C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image, recent scholarship on premodern eyewitness testimony to the supernatural, the magician Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and the best lost spots of Princeton University.

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 the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.

Chapter Headings:

• 00:00 | Introduction & What is Conjectural History
• 4:30 | The Scottish Enlightenment vs. the Renaissance Tradition
• 11:42 | Conjectural History & a Case Study: Jose de Acosta
• 19:30 | Theology, Science & The Renaissance
• 26:19 | Lorenzo Valla and the Donation of Constantine
• 38:19 | Conjecture, Divination, and Magic
• Closing | Reflections: History, Belief, and Closing Thoughts

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“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister orchestrators of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements that have declared war on all that passes for Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.

Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat—a conflict causing real-world damage—can we effectively resist. This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents shaping politics in the twenty-first century.

A.J.A. Woods is an intellectual historian who lives in Brighton, England. In 2022, Woods received a PhD from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada. Their writings on conspiracy theories and reactionary politics have been translated into four languages and appeared in Open Democracy, Patterns of Prejudice, and Marx & Philosophy Review of Books.

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 The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed, The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates globally.

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Since its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, 'Europe' has been defined, and redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, and with the narrative drive and scope of a novelist, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s major historical developments: the rise and fall of Rome; the explosion of Christianity; the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; the arrival of Europeans in the Americas; the violent upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the uncertainties of the present. Throughout, original sources allow the voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves.

Grappling with the multilayered identities that have always come with being European, Europe places the Europe of today in a long arc of history stretching back more than 2,500 years.

Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London and Chair of Trustees of the British School at Athens, an institute of advanced research. He is a four-time winner of the Runciman Award, for his books An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel: A Biography, Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution, and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, published by Penguin in 2019. He is also the author of The Greeks: A Global History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic, and an honorary citizen of Greece. He was knighted in 2025.

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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Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms (i.e., plants and cyanobacteria) to external light cues. Additionally, Beronda pursues this theme in the context of effective mentoring and leadership of individuals, and the role of innovative leaders in supporting success. You can find her at her website.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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James Loeffler is an award-winning historian, and Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Previously he taught at the University of Virginia and served as Dean’s Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. Currently a Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.

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Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., this landmark in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today. It delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

When it was first published in 1951. the New Yorker wrote, “Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, calling The True Believer the famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.

This episode was originally published on April 10, 2024.

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To answer that question, in Episode 1 of Season 6, I have as our guest Hugh Liebert. A Professor of Political Science at West Point, he earned his doctorate through the Committee on Social Thought at UChicago, and has written two books: Plutarch’s Politics (2016), and Gibbon’s Christianity (2022).

Drawing on Gibbon’s Christianity, we look at the historian’s paradoxical views on religion, his early conversions to both Catholicism and Protestantism, and how he used those experiences to chronicle the early church as a disciplined new republic that overcame decadent Roman polytheism much as how the Roman Republic conquered aged empires. Along the way, we discuss Gibbon’s ironic and elusive style, his larger essays and memoirs, and the love of literary glory that pervades his fascinating life and complex work.

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 the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

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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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Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas.

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Younus Y. Mirza is the Founding Director of the Barzinji Institute for Global Virtual Learning at Shenandoah University. He defended his dissertation in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University and has taught at Millsaps and Allegheny Colleges. His research focuses on the relationship between the Bible and the Qur’an and the shared stories between them

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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Books discussed:

• Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian (English translation by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, 1961, 1993, 1996).
• The Wondrous Elixir of the Two Chinese Lovers by Tim McGirk (Plum Rain Press, 2025)

Related episodes:

• In BOA episode 53, John chatted with Tim about his Plum Rain Press novel The Wondrous Elixir of the Two Chinese Lovers. It weaves the story of archeological discoveries in modern-day Mexico with that of Xu Fu, a Taoist alchemist/priest sent to bring back the secret of immortality.
• And in episode 65, John and Tim talked about Simon Winchester’s biography of Sinologist Joseph Needham, The Man Who Loved China.

The Books on Asia Podcast is co-produced with Plum Rain Press.

Subscribe to the BOA podcast from your favorite podcast service.

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Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee’svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee’s methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil.

Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate connections between the university’s shifting physical form and its evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at postcolonial Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture. Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor would become more important than research and education, that the allure of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline.

A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that, even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable. The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone, brick, and steel are here to stay.

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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Dr. Marisa Karyl Franz traces how Siberian museums helped construct shamanism as an ethnographic category. Shamans, while familiar and embedded in local space, were recast as icons of cultural otherness or representatives of an imagined primitive past. Through the evolving languages of science, anthropology, and empire, the local was abstracted and exported, feeding global museum networks and shaping modern anthropology. Yet, the museums held onto the intimacy of place, preserving tensions between familiarity and spectacle, documentation and desire.

By placing Siberia at the center of a broader intellectual and political history, Near and Desired Things challenges assumptions about where modern knowledge is made and redefines provincial spaces as sites of innovation and as forces that reshape the terms of empire.

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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Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual’s life and the labor performed in the home.

Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso, 2025) is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature. Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.

Leopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.

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 this book, Andres traces the concept of subsumption through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, in both its philosophical dimensions and its relevance to critical social theory. Andres examines the utilisation of subsumption as a conceptual framework whereby a particular is brought under a universal, up to the complex and dynamic operations of subsumption in modern-day capitalism, as a system that subsumes human life under the logic of value. As Andres illustrates through the intricate and careful argument in the book, following the use of subsumption in the work of these key theorists not only offers a new perspective to understand these thinkers, but helps articulate a historically-focused and robust framework to investigate the mechanisms of capitalist power. Of particular interest perhaps from a political economy perspective is Andres’ investigation of Marx’s journey through subsumption within the pages of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx, and also how the theoretical framework of subsumption helps us understand production and social reproduction under capitalism.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

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Giulio Boccaletti is an author whose writings on natural resources security have been translated into several languages. He has held international leadership positions in the private and not-for-profit sectors. He is the scientific director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, one of Europe’s largest research institutions focused on Earth science and transition economics, and cofounder of Chloris Geospatial, a space-tech company specializing in Earth observations. His books include Water: A Biography, and his work has been featured in acclaimed PBS series such as H2O: The Molecule That Made Us, Human Footprint, and The Future of Nature.

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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Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto literary and educational writing, from roughly 1530 to 1830, the period Pelevin identifies as classical in the history of Pashto letters. Moving from the earliest, now-lost administrative "Daftar" of Shaykh Mali through the sectarian mystical poetry of Bayazid Ansari's Roshani movement, the Sunni traditionalist manuals of Akhund Darweza, and the towering figures of Khushhal Khan Khatak and ʿAbd al-Rahman Momand (Rahman Baba). This book reconstructs a written tradition that has been persistently marginal to both regional and Western scholarship. Pelevin frames this history through what he calls the dissolution of the Persophonie and the slow emergence of Pashto as a written language in the shadow of, and eventually alongside with the dominant Persian literary cosmopolis. Rather than reading this as a proto-nationalist story imposed retroactively, he traces a much older and more specific discourse of Pashtun self-identity — descent, language, custom, and religion, articulated by the authors themselves, long before any colonial or nationalist framework existed to name it.

What makes the book distinctive is its insistence on working from the Pashto texts as primary sources in their own right, rather than as illustrations for arguments made in Persian chronicles, in colonial-era administrative writing, or in the historiography of "Pashtun tribal society" that has tended to treat literary production as peripheral to political and military history. Pelevin is explicit about this reversal: he wants to shift attention from the political to the poetical.

Qaseem Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory, historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds.

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

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This program is the first in a series of programs held in conjunction with YIVO’s current digitization of the Jewish Labor and Political Archives (JLPA). Consisting of nearly 200 collections encompassing 3.5 million pages of archival documents that were collected by the Bund Archives, the JLPA forms the world’s most comprehensive body of material pertaining to Jewish political activity in Europe and the United States.

This lecture originally took place on April 28, 2025.

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The contributors show how research in these unique archives challenges previous assumptions about Ba'thist Iraq and the workings of authoritarian regimes. Their chapters provide fresh insights into how Saddam Hussein's regime functioned both at the elite level and through everyday bureaucratic practices, shedding light on state power, social relations, and international politics of the Middle East. The volume also critically reflects on the ethical questions posed by the archives, including their origins, the impact of their removal from Iraq, and access barriers for local scholars. Rich in empirical detail yet framed by cutting-edge theoretical questions, this book demonstrates how the Iraqi archives have reshaped debates about authoritarianism, governance, repression, and state-society relations well beyond the Iraqi case.

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 A Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe (Liverpool UP, 2024), Marek Tuszewicki studies manuscripts, printed publications, and memoirs to tease out therapeutic advice, recipes, magical incantations, kabbalistic methods, and practical techniques, together with the ethical considerations that such approaches entailed. His research fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in Eastern Europe, shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture, and on how the need to treat sickness brought Jews and their neighbors together.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Tuszewicki about this book, led by cultural critic and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen.

Buy the book here

This book talk originally took place on November 11, 2024.

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Behind these archetypes of the 1960s and 70s stood a political movement as mutable as it was international, that of Black Power, with the goal of bringing about a global uprising. This insurrection of Black worlds has haunted the West for centuries, rumbling beneath the words of Frantz Fanon and Lorraine Hansberry, the films of Melvin Van Peebles and Sarah Maldoror, in the albums of Sun Ra and Archie Shepp, the poems of Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. In Fantômes de la révolution noire: Une Histoire culturelle transatlantique ([Ghosts of the Black Revolution: A Transatlantic Cultural History] Éditions Ròt-Bò-Krik, 2026), Grégory Pierrot evokes the ghosts of Black Power and shows that the arts are real laboratories where the Black Revolution is formed, reinvented, and broadcast.

Guest Grégory Pierrot is Associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where he studies the cultural and artistic networks of the Black Atlantic. In addition to Fantômes de la révolution noire published by Ròt-Bò-Krik earlier this year, Dr. Pierrot has translated and co-translated a series of essays and novels from and into French, and edited or co-edited several volumes concerning the literature of and about the Haitian revolution in French and English. He is also the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture and Decolonize Hipsters.

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 under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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You can purchase the book from Bloomsbury here. The book is also available Open Access 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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Drawing on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French, and Afrikaans, Dr. Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates. Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976, this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford’s anti-communist intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also fueling a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign policy that defined debates over the country’s proper role in the Global South into the 1990s.

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 The Devil’s Castle, Susanne Paola Antonetta weaves a haunting narrative that confronts the darkest chapters of psychiatric history while offering a bold vision for the future of mental health care. In 1939, the eugenics movement growing throughout the West did its worst in Nazi Germany. Through the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, five asylums and an abandoned jail were transformed into gas chambers. Tens of thousands of lives—predominantly adults with neuropsychiatric conditions—were extinguished in those structures, ultimately paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust.

Interlacing her experiences of psychosis with the complex history of psychiatry, Antonetta sheds light on the intersections of madness and societal perceptions of mental difference. She brings to life the stories of Paul Schreber and Dorothea Buck, two historical figures who act as models for mind care and acceptance. This gripping exploration traverses the spectrum of neurodiversity, from the devastating consequences of dehumanization to the transformative potential of understanding and acceptance.

With The Devil’s Castle, Antonetta not only unearths the failures of our past, but also envisions a more compassionate, enlightened approach to consciousness and mental health care. This is a story of tragedy, resilience, and hope—a rallying cry for change that dares to challenge the limits of how we define and support the human mind.

Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of The Devil's Castle: Eugenics, Nazi Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Hurts Us Now. She is also the author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Her awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon Best Memoir of the Year award, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today, and The New Republic and have been featured on CNN as well as the CBC Ideas documentary series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

For more information about her work please visit her website here and sign up for notifications about her regular contributions to Psychology Today.

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher in Massachusetts. You can follow her on Instagram, Insight Timer, YouTube (@drelizabethcronin) or visit her website.

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In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.

This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023.

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• Draws on a range of primary sources
• Brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois into conversation with his Indian contemporaries
• Adds a novel historical perspective to recent scholarship on critical social epistemology
• Diversifies current ways of doing Indian philosophy

Abstract: In this book, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach studies how Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Mohammed Iqbal (1877-1938), Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) diagnose the epistemic oppression they perceive and experience, their analysis of the coloniality of being as its cause, and their proposals to counter it. Kirloskar-Steinbach explores how these voices seek to co-create a space in which they can experience what it means to be free from the conceptual domination of academic frameworks, relish that freedom with their collaborators and, in the equal participation that that space affords, develop open-ended concepts that help them to resist the coloniality of being.

Jessica Zu's personal reflection: This book models for readers and scholars alike on how to practice "hermeneutical democracy." The notion of hermeneutical philosophy resonates strongly with Artruso Escobar's philosophy of "pluri-verse" instead of Eurocentric metaphysics of "uni-verse", Roger Ames's "zeotology" or philosophy of the living in Chinese traditions, and Brook Ziporyn's mystical atheism against the dominant paradigm of "nous as arché".

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

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In 1945, the new Labour government’s development programme aimed at creating a social democracy that would benefit all members of society. The counterrevolution launched by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, which remains in force today, promoted individualism and deregulation. The transition from one programme to another was a response to the growth of finance and services centred on the City of London, and to decolonisation, which redirected trade to Europe. The expansion of credit led to the financial crisis of 2008 and the years of austerity that followed, and fuelled the populist movement that culminated in Brexit. Hopkins argues that, instead of following the free-market policies of its mentor, the United States, Britain should draw on its own history of social democracy and borrow from its neighbours in Europe, where communitarian principles continue to be upheld.

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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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In The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report (Melville House and New South, 2026), Australian historian Dr. Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex – namely, that sex is sexist – the book explores Hite’s fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Dr. Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality.

In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Dr. Rosa Campbell’s examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women.

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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Gregory Claeys is professor emeritus of the history of political thought at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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

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Michael Hawley is an assistant professor in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow with the James Madison Program, he wrote the book, Natural Law Republicanism: Cicero's Liberal Legacy (2022). Now, he's working on a new one, Preaching to the Choir: The Rhetoric of Prophets, Reformers, and Demagogues.

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 the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

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“A rich resource of Deleuze’s research that is unavailable in his published writing

• Includes summaries of 216 seminar sessions available in transcripts and recordings
• Summaries are based on research for the Deleuze Seminars project (co-directed by Charles J. Stivale and Daniel W. Smith), where full transcripts and translations, to which readers will have access for simultaneous or subsequent consultation, have been developed by an international team of scholar-translators
• Alongside summaries, an attached critical apparatus provides references to corresponding links within Deleuze’s writings, seminars, and other sources to facilitate additional research

The texts in this volume - summaries of the 216 seminars taught by Gilles Deleuze - provide unique insight into the latter half of Deleuze’s teaching career. Deleuze understood his seminars as a laboratory for developing his ongoing research, and this volume is a guide to the creative becomings in the development of his philosophical works through teaching.
From Anti-Oedipus (1972) to The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1987), Deleuze examined a wide range of philosophical perspectives in pursuit of successive thematic topics. These summaries and commentaries serve as incitement for further research, allowing readers familiar with Deleuze’s work to find new angles of approach and providing greater access to readers coming to his work for the first time."

New Books Network:

• Stivale, Charles J., and Daniel W. Smith. (2025-10-21). "Gilles Deleuze, On Painting"

Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour:

• Stivale, Charles J., Taylor Adkins, and Cooper Cherry. (2025-08-12). "Deleuze and Guattari – How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs"
• Stivale, Charles J., Daniel W. Smith. (2023-06-29). "Deleuze on Painting and Cinema".

The Deleuze Seminars: here

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Catherine Fletcher is professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of several books on early modern Italy, including The Roads to Rome, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance and The Black Prince of Florence: The Life of Alessandro de’ Medici.

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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Jonathan Daly is Professor of History at University of Illinois Chicago. In addition to The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior (Stanford University Press, 2025), he is the author of several monographs on Russian and Soviet history.

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Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.

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Having previously taught at Princeton University, Ober is a professor of political science, classics, and philosophy at Stanford University, the Director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of many books, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), and Civic Bargain (2023), co-written with Brook Manville, he was previously a Madison’s Notes guest in Season 3.

Drawing on his 2015 book, we discuss the history of ancient Greece and the political legacy of its classical period. Our conversation ranges from the Bronze Age Collapse and the age of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to the rise of the Greek city-state and decline of democratic Athens.

We discuss contingencies of the Peloponnesian war, the cases for and against Alcibiades, whether the polity flourished under Macedonian and Roman empires, the relationship of philosophy to civics, was Socrates guilty and how much did Plato invent about him, in what way the god Hermes symbolized Greek trade in the Mediterranean, if James Madison truly understood ancient history, and lastly Ober’s work with the growing civics programs in American higher education.

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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Pamela Walker Laird is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Colorado Denver. Laird’s publications include her newest book, Self-Made: The Stories that Forged an American Myth (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Harvard University Press, 2006), which won the 2006 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history and is available in Chinese; and Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), a Choice Outstanding Academic Book.

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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Marinus de Jong, Ph.D., is assistant professor of the theology of neo-Calvinism at Theologische Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands. He co-editedThe Klaas Schilder Reader: The Essential Theological Writings (Lexham, 2022).

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Part introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past, this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this knowledge with disturbing success.

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

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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What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and disaffection, estrangement among individuals and groups, and a crisis of democracy? This book supplies the answers, offering a bold new account of Dewey as an educational theorist who is essential for our troubled times.

Revealing the true scope of Dewey’s educational vision, this book provides a new perspective on a neglected aspect of the philosophical tradition. Natalia Rogach Alexander's Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey (Columbia University Press, 2025) presents an alternative canon—running from Plato to Rousseau to Du Bois—that recasts philosophy in terms of education and, in so doing, opens new pathways for social critique and the liberation of human potential.

Natalia Rogach Alexander is a lecturer in philosophy 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.

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In Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (U Notre Dame Press, 2026), noted political scientist Arlene W. Saxonhouse offers fresh and provocative explorations of ancient political theorists, lending new insights about democracy's foundations and principles. These insights are more relevant than ever in a moment when the viability of democratic regimes is under scrutiny. Saxonhouse provides an in-depth discussion of the modern mythmakers (Hobbes, Paine, Hamilton, Mill, and Arendt, among others) who, in praising or excoriating Athenian democracy, have in fact distorted it to support their own assessments of democracy. She then offers detailed reinterpretations of the writings on democracy of four ancient theorists who had directly experienced life in the first democratic regime: Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle.

Saxonhouse argues that the mythmaking that often attends our views of Athenian democracy—whether as a flawed, slaveholding regime that fostered factions and oppressed women or as an ideal regime of egalitarian and participatory democracy—blinds us to the deeper understanding of democracies that these ancient theorists can offer.

Arlene W. Saxonhouse is the Caroline Robbins Collegiate Professor of Political Science, Emerita, at the University of Michigan. She is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with ancient Greek political thought, including Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens and Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought.

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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Stalnaker’s book The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale UP, 2025) unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City.

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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New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Susanna Drake is Professor of Religious Studies at Macalister College. Her first book was Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts.

Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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At its heart is Lawrence Douglas’s fresh interpretation of the law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights.

Providing rare historical perspective on the dilemmas facing international courts, The Criminal State is a sweeping, provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice.

Our guest is Professor Lawrence Douglas, who is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College.

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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Nadler makes a powerful case that there is no real divinity for Spinoza. God is Nature, and isn’t an object of worshipful awe or religious reverence but can only be understood through philosophy and science. There is nothing supernatural—no mystery, ineffability, or sublimity. Spinoza does speak of “blessedness” and “salvation,” but these, too, are to be understood in natural and rational terms, as the peace of mind and happiness that come from understanding ourselves and the world.

Whether Spinoza believed in God is a fascinating and enduring controversy. Spinoza, Atheist promises to transform our understanding of his views and to make clear just how radical a thinker he was and remains. 

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His many books include Rembrandt’s Jews, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Spinoza: A Life, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die, and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age.

Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint doctoral program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. 

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In our podcast we discuss how Law’s attempt to see the Scottish Enlightenment thinks as concerned with the civilising process differs from other attempts to claim them for sociology, the legacy of the Act of Union for these writers and how one became a thinker in these times. We also discuss why Adam Smith is, for Law, an ‘ambivalent’ figure for sociology and what we can learn from these writers about the scope and historical insight sociology should have.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.

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This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Professor Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning.

This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease.

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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Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times-bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award,

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

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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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Christopher S. Celenza is an American scholar of Renaissance history and the current James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also a professor of history and classics

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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Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt--all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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The book’s core insight is simple and powerful. Manuscripts do not possess fixed authority. They gain it through methods, institutions, and infrastructures. Well argued and meticulously researched, Dr Yi’s study is less about a single manuscript than about how scholarly canons are formed, stabilised, and remembered. From Erasmus to Maius invites readers to rethink not only textual criticism but also the construction of academic authority.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels put forward “elite” theories of democracy and gave us terms such as the “ruling class” and “elites” itself. Drawing on their work and tracing the history of democratic thought through figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, C. Wright Mills, and Raymond Aron, Elites and Democracy reveals that this fundamentally elitist basis of democracy—democracy understood as competition between elites—was there all along. The challenge is to think it anew.

Moving away from procedural or principled conceptions of democracy, Elites and Democracy develops a dynamic theory of democracy, one grounded in movement. With current politics defined by a populist backlash against elites, dynamic democracy offers the tools we urgently need to understand our contemporary predicament and to act upon it.

Hugo Drochon is an Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is a historian of modern political thought, with interests in Nietzsche's politics.

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 this conversation, we discuss the problem of defining fascism, the distinctions between fascism and populism and why Martins argues that not every dictatorship or radical right movement should automatically be classified as fascist. The discussion also turns to the Portuguese case, including the Estado Novo, National Syndicalism and the debate surrounding Salazarism’s relationship to European fascism.

At a moment when the word “fascism” is increasingly invoked in public debate, Martins makes the case for conceptual precision without losing sight of fascism’s historical adaptability and political force. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about ideology, political modernity and the uses, and misuses, of language.

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During the contentious and progressive antebellum era, the Fowler family preached a gospel of self-improvement to a nation eager to embrace its foundational beliefs. For the first time, this new “science” of phrenology offered all Americans the ability to improve their station by unlocking their innate mental and emotional truths. Revered politicians, quirky celebrities, infamous criminals, and social outcasts all found their way to the Fowlers for skull readings.

Brimming with the energy to change the world, the Fowlers connected phrenology to practically every aspect of life in the young nation—from abolition to women’s rights, temperance to prison reform, spiritualism and mesmerism to vegetarianism and sexual education. But there was a dark side to this fad and to the Fowlers, and soon nefarious forces co-opted this once-hopeful sensation to justify racism and xenophobia.

Phrenology’s complex history stands as a commentary on the dreams and follies of the American republic. Though phrenology (and the Fowlers) ran afoul of the tide of history, its aspirational insistence on an individual’s ability to improve oneself became embedded in the fabric of the nation.

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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Guest Eliana Văgălău is Associate Professor and director of the French program at Loyola University Chicago. Her research on francophone Caribbean literature and contemporary philosophy focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as on questions of transnationalism, diaspora, and sexuality. In addition to co-editing this volume, she has published articles on the work of authors such as Maryse Condé, James Noël, and Jean-Claude Charles. As a founding member of the Collectif Jean-Claude Charles, she dedicates much of her work to making visible the work of this fundamental Haitian author. She has published translations of literary and philosophical texts and is currently completing an essay on contemporary French Caribbean fiction. By teaching a course on Black Paris, her extensive collaborations with contemporary Black artists and writers living in France today, as well as serving as co-organizer of the Black Europe Symposium in 2023 at Loyola University Chicago, she has developed a secondary research interest in the city of Paris as a
chief site of Black transnational encounters.

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 progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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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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Lee Vinsel is a professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.

Benjamin Waterhouse is a professor of History at UNC Chapel Hill.

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Beyond politics, it is a set of discourses and practices that shape economic, social, legal, and cultural life all over the globe. 

Siniša Malešević's Nationalism as a Way of Life: The Rise and Transformation of Modern Subjectivities (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the global rise and transformation of nationalism and analyses the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms that have made it the dominant way of life in the twenty-first century. 

In a series of case studies across time and space, the book zooms in on three key forms of lived experience: how nationalism operates as a multi-faceted meta-ideology, how national categories have become organisationally embedded in everyday practices and why nationalism has become the dominant form of modern subjectivity. 

The book is aimed at readers interested in understanding how nation-states and nationalisms have attained such influence in contemporary world.

Siniša Malešević is Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at the University College, Dublin, and Senior Fellow at CNAM, Paris. He is the author of the award winning books Grounded Nationalisms (Cambridge, 2019) and Why Humans Fight (Cambridge, 2022). His work has been translated into fourteen languages.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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While Rustin certainly made some strategic mis-steps later in life, his challenges to the New Left, Black Power, and a regressing liberal establishment from 1964 until his passing in 1987 were insightful, cutting, and often quite prescient. At a time when the Left is in dire need of self-reflection and reorientation, Rustin’s work has gained a new relevance and urgency.

In a new collection of Rustin's writings from this period, Fong and Prescod gathered together articles and speeches that represent Rustin's Challenge to the Left of his day. Some of the pieces of Rustin’s writing chosen for inclusion have been published before, but only in pamphlets or newspapers from many decades ago. Some will be published for the first time here.
The volume also includes commentaries on these pieces by Adolph Reed, Jr., Jennifer Silva, Les Leopold, Mark Dudzic, Jen Pan, John-Baptiste Oduor, and many others, all contextualizing Rustin's challenge and demonstrating its continuing applicability.

Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas.

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James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and Law School and also holds an M.A. in European History from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Chicago.

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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D. Vance Smith is professor of English and former director of medieval studies at Princeton University. His many books include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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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Mostafa Hussein is assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim studies at the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the editor (with Brahim El Guabli) of Remembering Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Media.

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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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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Adam Smith and Modern Economics: Reclaiming the Moral High Ground (de Gruyter, 2026) suggests that neither of these two conventional understandings alone is accurate and conducive to human flourishing. Smith put markets in the context of morality, observing that markets serve best when our moral sentiments are followed.

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Stephen Sims is associate professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Greg is the Executive Director and Founder of the World War II Discussion Forum (wwiidf.org). He also has a strong interest in literature, culture, religion, science and philosophy (translation: he's an eclectic reader who is constantly missing deadlines for book reviews).

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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.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

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In Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance, a wide-ranging, elegantly written book, Vin argues that one of the major works of sixteenth-century plant writing, John Gerard’s The Herball, can reanimate our thinking about early modern literature and visual art. Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance brings together a rich archive include Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its English translations, seventeenth-century anatomy textbooks, and the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldi and Nicholas Hilliard. The book also makes exciting methodological interventions in the critical practices of early modern scholarship.

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According to a mysterious pamphlet published in 1602, the Wandering Jew was a real person, named Ahasversus, who was cursed by Jesus to eternal wandering after refusing to help him as he was led to his crucifixion. For more than four hundred years, many otherwise reliable witnesses have claimed to have seen the Wandering Jew. Moving in reverse chronological order, I, Wandering Jew explores crucial episodes in the story of this figure. We meet an unforgettable, Wandering Jew-like character who appeared out of nowhere in Israel in the 1950s; a nineteenth-century novelist who was the first Jew to favorably describe the Wandering Jew; an eighteenth-century German scholar who saw the Wandering Jew emerging from a devastating fire; and the man who likely inspired the 1602 pamphlet.

A work of history that reads like a detective story, I, Wandering Jew is also part memoir. As Mintzker discovers affinities between his own story and that of the Wandering Jew, the surprising history of an old antisemitic trope and its meanings becomes a profound meditation on home and exile, Judaism and Christianity, poetry and truth, the deep past and the present.

Yair Mintzker is professor of European history at Princeton University, where he also serves as the faculty head of Yeh College. Mintzker’s work explores the Sattelzeit, the time period in German history roughly between 1750 and 1850, with books dedicated to urban history, law, intellectual history, Jewish history, and literature. A future project involves military history as well.

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Mintzker received his M.A. in history from Tel-Aviv University (2003) and his Ph.D. from Stanford (2009). His latest book combines historical research and memoir in retelling the legend of Ahasver, the Wandering Jew. Its title is I, Wandering Jew: A Five-Century History of Our Modern Condition (Princeton UP, 2026).

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Recently, he contributed to the book, The New Conservatives (2025), an anthology edited by his colleague, Oren Cass, that re-articulates a conservative economic vision for the country. Drawing on it, we discuss the crisis of America’s political economy, from questions surrounding current AI, automation, and the end of free trade; political instability and populism; how economic policy can best serve American workers and families; and what makes us hopeful for the country’s future during its 250th anniversary.

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 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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Audrey Borowski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the philosophy of AI. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and Aeon.

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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Beyond States and Spies: The Security Intelligence Services of the Private Sector (Edinburgh UP, 2024) by Dr. Lewis Sage-Passant demonstrates - through original research - that such a monopoly never existed. Private sector intelligence is at least as old as the organised intelligence activities of the nation state. Beyond States and Spies offers a comparative examination of private and public intelligence, and makes a compelling case for understanding the dangers posed by unregulated intelligence in private hands. Overall, this casts new light on a hitherto under investigated academic space.

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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Jason Welle is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Boston College, where he teach courses on Christian-Muslim Relations and Islamic Mysticism.

Saman Nasser holds an MA in history from James Madison University, where he works as an educational staff.

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The book is an entertaining introduction to ancient Chinese thinkers, and what they can teach us about today’s most pressing political questions in China and beyond. China’s most original, diverse, and fascinating political debates took place more than two millennia ago, but they have profoundly shaped Chinese political thinking and practice ever since and, remarkably, their influence on the country’s leaders is only growing today. Yet these timeless debates which are very likely to influence the answers to such questions as whether China should use military force to take control of Taiwan seem far too little understood in the West. In this enlightening and entertaining book, Professor Bell takes the greatest thinkers from China’s past — Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Shang Yang, Han Feizi, Zhuangzi, and Mozi—and puts them in dialogue with each other in modern settings.

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Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.
Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the national uprisings that unified Italy and Germany, and the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. This is a history rich in irony and surprises. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom at any remove. Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

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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Communism comes from the future, but its hopes haunt our past. Reading revolutionary history from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising by the light of communist theory, from Marx to C. L. R. James, The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso Books, 2025) illuminates the possibilities for overcoming class society in the twenty-first century.
When Marx wrote that the Paris Commune of 1871 showed that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” he identified a principle that will remain true as long as capitalism and its class antagonism persist. Historical revolutions reveal essential features of our communist horizon, which would-be revolutionaries, then as now, must negotiate one way or another. In chapters that move from a critical history of the workers’ council to a reading of Marx’s theory of value as an inverted description of communism, Jasper Bernes synthesizes from a history of failure the key criteria for success. He defines for our present moment the urgent mission of the world proletariat.

Jasper Bernes lives in Oakland and teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. A regular contributor to the Field Notes section of the Brooklyn Rail, he is the author of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization and two books of poetry, We Are Nothing and So Can You and Starsdown.

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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In our conversation we discuss issues such as how she identified her places to visit and people to speak to, the daily experiences of crossing the US/Mexico border at El Paso, Texas, the important conversations that can come from speaking to people as people rather than labels and why, precisely, so many Americans bring up postmodernism at the same time that Universities no longer teach it.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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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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In Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (Yale UP, 2026), award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin’s story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin’s life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile.

Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

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John wants to know about the importance of the state as money-maker and underpinner of markets. Paul asks about the key historical ruptures; the conversation goes back a millennium to traders in Aden and in China. Together Paul and Sven speculate on the role violence plays inside the “free” market that capitalist exchange established and now somewhat remarkably sustains. The singular turning-point of the late 19th century (which Sven decided to present in three interwoven chapters) comes in for sustained attention.

Mentioned in the Episode

• Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (2014)
• Ursula Le Guin “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” (National Book Foundation Medal speech 2014)
• Ferdinand Braudel Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (1979)
• Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)
• Listen and Read here.

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Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore.

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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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Ìwà: the Process-Relational Dimension to African Metaphysics (Springer, 2024) approaches the subject of African metaphysics historically as it connects Ancient Egypt to Yorùbá. It provides a history of African metaphysics from ancient Egypt or Kemet down to John Boakye Danquah and Placide Tempels in the 20th century and then Innocent Asouzu, Ada Agada, and Aribiah David Attoe, in the 21st century. As it surpasses the deductions of these previous works, it moves further to showcase African originality and approaches to studying reality, whilst resisting the temptation to deduce conclusions from Western philosophy. It is the first book in the history of African philosophy to use a process-relational approach to interrogate African metaphysics. It also serves to harmonize and engage prominent African scholars who have written on the subject of African metaphysics. The general scope of this book centers on engaging the history of distortion and misunderstanding of African metaphysics by providing a relevant and reliable process-relational background as well as an alternative trivalent logic system. Unless African metaphysical theories are understood from this perspective, they will remain powerless to overcome these misrepresentations. It appeals to students and researchers internationally actively working in the fields of African philosophy, Intercultural African studies as well as process studies.

Online May 11-13, 2026 conference on Processual Philosophy, more information here.

Two other books by Prof. Ofuasia on related topics

1. Panentheism and Concepts of God in African Traditional Religions: A Third-Wave Proposal, Springer 2026

2. An Exploration of the Parallels Between African and Process Metaphysics: Introducing the Metaphysics of Force and Becoming, Springer 2026.

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 Ainehi Edoro argues in Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2026) that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

Ainehi Edoro is a Mellon-Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary 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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John B. Judis is an author and American journalist, a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo, a former senior writer at the National Journal, and a former senior editor at The New Republic

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. His companion Substack newsletter, America and Beyond,” offers commentary and insights on the podcast. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024).

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Drawing on his book, Lost in the Chaos (2023), we discuss modern disenchantment, recent attempts at re-enchantment, and the virtue of hope from its pale imitators to its authentic examples, from Anglo-Saxon warriors to Soviet dissidents.

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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An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.
A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.
Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today.

David Bather Woods is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is coeditor with Timothy Stoll of The Schopenhauerian Mind. He has contributed chapters to The Proustian Mind, Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, and The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook.

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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Drawing on urban, heritage, and tourism studies, visual and memory studies, and environmental psychology, Icon Dresden examines Dresden’s history, identity, visual representations, and rebuilding decisions. It exposes the narratives that define its place in German and international memory and how, paradoxically, they support both Dresden’s current image as a symbol of peace and reconciliation and its backing of nativist and far-right movements. The book is available Open Access.

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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Winner of the 2012 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication Finalist for the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature

Eliyahu Stern was the Tell fellow at the YIVO Institute in 2004.

This book talk originally took place on November 7, 2013.

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Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought at The University of Queensland. A noted authority in the history of religion and of ideas, he has written many books on subjects as diverse as God, the Devil, the afterlife, witchcraft and witches, Adam and Eve, heaven and hell in Enlightenment England, and early modern demonic possession. His recent works include The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West (2024), Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (2023), and The Antichrist: A New Biography (2020), all published by Cambridge University Press.

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

Twitter: here

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In our discussion we discuss the formation and activity of the Dillingham Commission. This includes discussing a number of key figures, such as Franz Boas who measures skulls for the commission and in so doing uses the same tools of the eugenicists and positivists to undercut their racist claims and Yamato Ichihashi who, while vociferously making the case that Japanese migrants such as himself are the ideal ‘Americans’ ends up being an example of the ‘insurmountable difference’ placed in front of such groups. We end by discussing how Zora Neale Hurston, once Boas’s student, provides a different way of conceiving of race and its place in immigration debates.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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Stuart Jones is professor of intellectual history at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic, Victorian Political Thought, and Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don.

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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We live in an age where Hitler and the Nazis dominate our cultural imagination, shaping values once defined by religion. Historian Alec Ryrie explores why society remains captivated by this struggle, from history and fiction to modern myths such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. He examines the costs of our Nazi obsession and questions what will come as our anti-Nazi moral consensus frays and both the Left and Right begin to move on. With a fresh take on modern history and pop culture, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (Reaktion, 2025) offers a thought-provoking look at the culture wars and our shifting political crises, challenging assumptions on both sides and asking what a new moral vision might look like.

Alec Ryrie is professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University and a fellow of the British Academy. His previous books include Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. He lives in rural County Durham.

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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Rogers shows that conservatism has been defined differently at different times: as a loose set of connected ideas reacting against the French Revolution; as a kind of disposition or instinct in favor of the status quo; and more recently as any ideas opposed to the political left. But he also allows a set of questions to guide his argument for conservatism’s merits: What is conservatism? Is it a coherent and attractive philosophy? What are conservatives for? And how is today’s conservatism related to its past? In his answers, Rogers paints a compelling and coherent picture of an aligned and attractive set of ideas.

Dr. Tristan J. Rogers teaches Logic and Latin at Donum Dei Classical Academy in San Francisco, CA. He has also taught philosophy at Santa Clara University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Authority of Virtue: Institutions and Character in the Good Society (2020).

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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William H. F. Altman, having been persuaded by Plato's Republic that Justice requires the philosopher to go back down into the Cave, has devoted his professional life to the cause of public education. Since retiring in 2013, he has been working as an independent scholar on the continuation of Plato the Teacher (2012).

Joseph Liss is an independent scholar based in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. He can be reached at Joseph.Nathaniel.Liss@gmail.com.

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Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Nihilistic Times, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and Undoing the Demos.

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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Drawing on both historical examples and recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic, Stegenga outlines his approach before delving into its implications for scientific evaluation, testimony, values, progress, and credit, as well as the nature of science during times of crisis. Truth, he shows, may not be easily identified in the short term. However, an evaluation of scientific justification, grounded in shared standards, is possible. This framework helps us appraise—and appreciate—historical theories that ultimately weren’t accurate and offers fresh insights about appropriate science communication and public trust in scientific research. Justification and scientific rigor are not just means to an end, Stegenga writes, but the very heart of good science.
Ambitious, authoritative, and accessible, Heart of Science offers a new vision for the philosophy of science.

Jacob Stegenga is professor of philosophy in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Medical Nihilism and Care and Cure: An Introduction to Philosophy of Medicine

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TalkArtCulture

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

Moulie Vidas is Associate Professor of Religion and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University.

Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston.

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Cyril Welch is professor emeritus of philosophy at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada.

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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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Neilesh Bose is Professor of History at the University of Victoria.

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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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Told and retold in many languages, the legend of the Blood Countess has consumed cultural imaginations around the world. But despite claims that Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed as many as 650 girls, some have wondered if the Countess was herself a victim- of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns known to history. So, was Elizabeth Bathory a monster, a victim, or a bit of both? With the breathlessness of a whodunit, drawing upon new archival evidence and questioning old assumptions, in The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster (Bloomsbury, 2026) Shelley Puhak traces the Countess's downfall, bringing to life an assertive woman leader in a world sliding into anti-scientific, reactionary darkness-a world where nothing is ever as it seems. In this exhilarating narrative, Puhak renders a vivid portrait of history's most dangerous woman and her tumultuous time, revealing just how far we will go to destroy a woman in power.

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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From the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy, and the medical humanities, in Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Vanessa Rampton sheds light on the politics of medical progress and how they have downplayed the tensions between individual and social goods. She examines how a shared consensus about its value gives medical progress vast political and economic capital, revealing who benefits, who is left out, and who is harmed by this narrative. From ancient Greece to artificial intelligence, exploring the origins and ethics of different visions of progress offers valuable insight into how we can make them more meaningful in future. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

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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Field’s training in political theory, especially Straussian political theory, contributes to her understanding and analysis of the individuals at the heart of the story in Furious Minds—and how these particular academics think, but in particular how they think about politics and political projects. The substance of Furious Minds is focused on the past decade or so of engagement between these various schools of thought and the Trump Administration—both while in elected office as well as during the out of office interregnum. At the same time, Field traces the deep origins of some of these schools of thought through the longer conservative tradition in the United States. In our discussion, we explore the Claremonters, the Postliberals, and the National Conservatives. Each group is populated by well-educated (PhDs, published authors, etc.) individuals (mostly men) who are urging a concept of the common good, as they define it, on to the American people, through the Trump Administration’s rhetoric, policies, institutional dispositions, cultural approaches, and general demeanor. Field takes all of these thinkers and ideas seriously, making the case for understanding both the ideas themselves and their origins, while also critiquing much of this by exposing the more extremist bases behind these paths of thinking as well as the people who are purveying them.

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a tour de force of the intellectual and political landscape that has brought us to the midst of the second Trump Administration and provides the reader with deep insight into the radical origins of the myths and concepts that are the backbone of the current Trump Administration and the current Republican Party.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She studied political theory at Kenyon College and Boston College. 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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Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the Left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.

Hang Tu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore and Deputy Director of the CCKF–NUS Southeast Asia Center for Chinese Studies. A scholar of Chinese literature and thought, his research focuses on the cultural politics of emotion in modern and contemporary China. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Intellectual History, MCLC, and Prism.

Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on modern Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at cpham@g.harvard.edu.

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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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Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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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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Ann Komaromi is a Professor within the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Acting Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her interests include alternative publishing, underground networks and nonconformist literature and art, especially in the Soviet Union after Stalin.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.

The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.

From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.

Mentioned in the episode

• Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844)
• George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876)
• Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)?
• The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample.
• The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that.
• Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair.
• America's racial "one drop" rule.
• Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015)
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

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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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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.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

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Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history.

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

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This study of Italy’s Americanism explores social debates within Italy regarding emigration, the development of a Columbian narrative, European reactions to the Spanish-American War, the impact of American products on Italian society, and former US president Woodrow Wilson’s military intervention and political propaganda during the First World War. It highlights discussions among Italians about the implications of emigration, contrasting prevailing negative views with a counter-narrative from Italian journalists, scholars, and missionaries who visited the United States. The negotiation of US imports and their incorporation into the Italian national context document the formation of a distinct American subculture and the early phases of the nation’s Americanization.

The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888-1919 (University of Toronto Press, 2025) provides a unique perspective to assess the early stages of America’s “soft” expansion, as the flow of departing and returning emigrants made Italy a favourable terrain for commercial penetration in Europe, transforming an export ideology into a complex network of transatlantic relations.

Luca Cottini, PhD, is an associate professor of Italian in Villanova University. He is also the creator of the popular Youtube channel, Italian Innovators.

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

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In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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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Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist.

By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War (Stanford UP, 2023) is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age.

Peter Stansky is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford University. He has published extensively on the cultural, political, and literary milieu of twentieth-century Britain, including (with William Abrahams) the Orwell biographies The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1980), both finalists for the National Book Award.

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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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.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

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Melissa Adler explores Jefferson’s lasting influence on public institutions, from his personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress, to his archival practices in gov­ernment record-keeping and his museum at Monticello as a site of colonial knowledge production. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she reveals how his methods of classification and preservation shaped national memory and democratic participation.

Drawing from archival research and critical theory, Peculiar Satisfaction exposes the paradoxes of access, exclusion, and control embedded in information systems. As censorship and disinformation threaten democracy, Adler argues that understanding these foundational structures is essential to defending the role of knowledge in public life.

Melissa Adler is Associate Professor at Western University (London, Ontario) in the Fac­ulty of Information & Media Studies. She is the author of Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham)

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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In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Brahim El Guabli to talk about Saharanism, energy extraction, borders, and the ways deserts have been imagined as zones of sacrifice and permission. Brahim El Guabli also reflected on how these imaginaries shape migration, war, and ecological futures—from North Africa to Gaza.

Brahim El Guabli is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer based in Boston. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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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.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

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Nguyen argues that Benjamin’s work demonstrated a holistic philosophical project, and he takes the reader through the latter’s early critical engagement with anarchist praxis and Kantian thought, through to Benjamin’s ‘Marxist’ turn that put him in conversation with the Frankfurt School. The historical materialism of Benjamin, Nguyen carefully demonstrates, was centred on his critique of the ahistorical conceptions of time and history that were the foundation for popular, contemporaneous notions of ‘progress’. Benjamin rallied against neo-Kantians and early twentieth century social democrats alike for their adherence to the ‘infinite struggle’, which posited the necessity for the continued, unachievable pursuit of the realisation of some ethical beyond, abstracted from historical conditions and forces of production, namely capitalism, that made their realisation impossible. Against these ahistorical conceptions, Benjamin’s historical materialism saw modernism as a historically specific form of society, and not the eternal, fate-bound destiny that humanity was entrapped into.

Duy Lap Nguyen’s book offers a new insight into not only the crucial philosophy of Walter Benjamin, which demands resurrection in our historical juncture of overlapping crises and fascistic resurgence, but a richly detailed investigation into the ideas, people, and movements that surrounded Benjamin in his time. Nguyen’s book, then, provides a holistic account of Benjamin’s often forgotten philosophical contributions, how they were shaped, and what Benjamin can contribute to the critique of today’s political economy.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

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Pacific Island territories, indigenous peoples, regional and secessionist movements, and transnational solidarity groups, among others, rejected the efforts of large, powerful states to define self-determination along narrow lines. Instead, international historian Bradley R. Simpson shows they offered expansive visions of economic, political, and cultural sovereignty ranging far beyond the movement for decolonization with which they are often associated. As they did so, these movements and groups helped to vernacularize self-determination as a language of social justice and rights for people around the world.

An ambitious work of global breadth on a key geopolitical issue, The First Right transforms how we think about the making of the twentieth century world order and the place of the global South and decolonization in it.

Dr. Bradley R. Simpson is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Samee Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of World History at Drury University.

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Christian Raffensperger's edited volume Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2022) brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they describe their world. While we see in these essays that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it. Instead, they talked about the wider world, and often they had informants or textual sources that informed them about the world, even if they did not visit those distant places themselves. This volume shows that they also used similar ideas to create space and identity – whether talking about the desert, the holy land, or food practices in their texts. By examining medieval authors and their own perceptions of their world, this collection offers a framework for discussions of medieval Europe in the 21st century. In this conversation we talk about how this volume goes about broadening both the geographical scope and methodological approaches to reading medieval sources.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

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Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, chemical photography’s emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of empire, coal, and chemistry and from the archives of British photographic manufacturer Ilford Limited, Professor Henning exposes the ways photography shaped how we see and understand the atmosphere while leaving its toxic residues in the air, soil, and water.

Structured as thirty-six short chapters and with over seventy illustrations, this innovative book begins in interwar London, follows the supply of Ilford products to photographers on the West African coast, and considers photography as a military technology linked to the development of chemical warfare. Combining close readings of photographs with discussions of low-light, tropical, and aerial photography, Professor Henning examines the extraction and development of photographic materials, their role in the current environmental crisis, and how they have shaped experiences of time and the environment.

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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Wars are fought by organizations and people who have disparate visions of the world they live in and the conflict they are fighting. In Framing the First World War: How Divergent Views Shaped a Global Conflict (UP of Kansas, 2025), a team of leading scholars explore the gulf between imagined warfare and the realities of battle. By doing so, they investigate how the military forces that contested the First World War framed the conflict they were involved in and how those perspectives shaped and influenced the ways in which they sought to understand, conduct, and respond to the war. Guided by editors Dr. Michael P.M. Finch, Dr. Aimée Fox and Dr. David G. Morgan-Owen, the authors use the notion of “frames” and the concept of “framing” to enable us to engage directly with the complexity and diversity of the conflict, which was fought for different reasons and in different ways, incorporating a range of issues with implications for the conduct of the war.

Improving our appreciation of how commanders saw the world around them and their views on the war they were conducting opens up valuable new approaches for understanding debates over the higher direction of the conflict and the civil-military relations that underpinned them. The contributors to Framing the First World War work towards a fuller historical appraisal of how military figures understood the war, moving beyond a purely military analysis to incorporate broader cultural and social topics, including education, medicine, politics, and law.

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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An eloquent account of the moral logic that propelled the development of an immoral institution, John Samuel Harpham's The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2025) reveals the power of an overlooked tradition of ideas in the history of human bondage.

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Keidrick Roy is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He has received national attention through media outlets such as CBS News Sunday Morning and the Chicago Review of Books and appears in the HBO documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches. He has curated two major exhibitions at the American Writers Museum in Chicago on Black American figures, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Ralph Ellison.

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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Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Stuckey traces the symbolic and iconic Jefferson in a number of distinct areas, each of which communicate different presentations or representations of Jefferson himself but also how we, as citizens, consume the idea of Jefferson. All of these are avenues to understand American national identity. As a scholar of presidential rhetoric, Stuckey begins the research by exploring how other presidents have used Jefferson in their speeches and their rhetoric, finding that the vast majority of presidents have referenced Jefferson in some form or in some way to legitimize their own policies. Many presidents have integrated Jefferson’s own words (and he wrote many, many words over a long life, especially for the time) as a way to authorize what they were doing while in office. Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are then traces the many memorials and monuments that integrate Jefferson in some capacity. But this section is split into two pieces, one that specifically focuses on the Jefferson-centric presentations, and the other part that integrates Jefferson with other Founders or other presidents (like Mt. Rushmore). Stuckey makes clear the key dimension around the building of these kinds of memorials and monuments: they are as much about the people choosing to build them and how they are to look and exist as they are about the individual, in this case Jefferson, being honored within them. The next section of Remembering Jefferson examines Jefferson in popular culture, particularly in televisual and cinematic popular culture. And while Jefferson is, again, in many places, he comes across in fascinating ways in these renderings, since his relationship to slavery—that he had over 500 enslaved individuals over his lifetime, that a number of those who were enslaved were also his children—is often portrayed as incidental and as a kind of footnote. Jefferson is often hazy and romantic in these narratives. The final section of the book assesses Jefferson within children’s literature, since this is also a realm where Jefferson is taking on a civic teaching, and the presentation is about communicating a kind of citizenship to young people.

Mary Stuckey has produced an important reading of the United States by reading Thomas Jefferson in all the places and spaces where he turns up. Remembering Jefferson: Who He was, Who We Are is a delight to read, and discusses the complex ideas of national identity, enslavement, race, power, citizenship, and civic virtue.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time.

A History of England in 25 Poems (Penguin, 2025) by Professor Catherine Clarke is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Professor Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story.

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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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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Angie Hobbs is emerita Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. She gained a degree in Classics and a PhD in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and her chief interests are in ancient philosophy and literature, and ethics and political theory from classical thought to the present, and she has published widely in these areas, including Plato and the Hero. She works in a number of policy sectors, and contributes regularly to media around the world, including many appearances on In Our Time on Radio 4; she has spoken at the World Economic Forum at Davos, the Athens Democracy Forum, the Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament and Westminster Abbey and been the guest on Desert Island Discs and Private Passions. Website here

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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Udel provides the most comprehensive study to date of this corpus of nearly a thousand picture books, chapter books, story and poetry collections, and anthologies. Moving geographically from Europe to the Americas and chronologically through the twentieth century, she considers this emerging canon in relation to the deep Jewish past and imagined Jewish futures before reckoning with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused political ideologies ranging from socialism to Zionism and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism, one shaped equally by the utopianism of the Jewish left and important shifts in the Western understanding of children, childhood, and family life.

Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.

Interviewee: Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University.

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 Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Much of the content of this book builds on Greene’s previously published book The Dialectics of Saturn, which we discussed a couple years ago.

Douglas Greene is an independent historian. His many previous books have included A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism, Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union and The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade's Revenge, all of which have been discussed previously on this show. He is a frequent contributor to Left Voice.

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Noam Sienna is the Jerome and Lorraine Aresty Visiting Scholar in Jewish Book Arts at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers-New Brunswick. He received his PhD in History and Museum Studies from the University of Minnesota and is also a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His monograph received the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians Association.

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.

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

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Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Oxford UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.

Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam

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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The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.

For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here. 

Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here. 

Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California.

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