This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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Sep 28, 2026 · 1:35:56
Tune in to this discussion about How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture by Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda T. Moses (Rowman & Littlefield,…
Sep 27, 2026 · 49:09
Eminent historian Peter Burke joins Jana Byars to discuss his new book, The Connoisseur: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2026), considering the art connoisseur from the Renaissance…
Sep 25, 2026 · 1:28:31
From the inside flap: “ In this lucid and inventive work, Ian Buchanan argues that the pivotal concepts ‘assemblage’ and ‘affect,’ which were separated at birth, need to be…
Sep 24, 2026 · 1:16:21
In Iconic Fascism: The Excess of Destruction and Creation in Interwar Radical Right-wing Politics (Bloomsbury, 2026) Aristotle Kallis uncovers the paradox at the heart of fascist…
Sep 22, 2026 · 34:12
In Tainted Tools: New Materialisms As a Decolonial Project (Manchester University Press, 2026), Angela Last offers a provocative intervention into the tense relationship between…
Sep 19, 2026 · 46:10
With rising temperatures, longer summers, drought, and more wildfires occurring in the United States and Canada, there is growing interest in the impact and efficacy of…
Sep 14, 2026 · 1:06:22
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Christopher B. Patterson, Professor of the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, discussing their recently…
Sep 14, 2026 · 38:51
Edward Blum interviews Mark Peterson on his new book The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History . The American Revolution occurred at a time…
Sep 9, 2026 · 1:02:39
In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society. In this interview, Morteza Hajizade h interviews Leonhard…
Sep 7, 2026 · 1:07:38
“The general thrust of capitalist policy in this period aims at the intensified imposition of work in response to ongoing struggle against it.” —Harry Cleaver, “Work Is Still the…
Sep 4, 2026 · 48:17
Truth Commissions and International Law: Jurisdiction, Representation, Authority (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines how truth commissions construct authoritative…
Aug 28, 2026 · 54:48
A fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at non-religious funerals in contemporary London, An Honest Death: Life's End and Humanist Funerals (Princeton UP, 2026) is an intimate and…
Aug 26, 2026 · 1:04:03
Whether recovering a lost history or charting a new land, scholars and explorers alike often hit at frontiers not only of place, but also knowledge. When the evidence only goes…
Aug 24, 2026 · 55:25
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso Books, 2026) is the definitive history of a dangerous right-wing…
Aug 24, 2026 · 32:25
Why does the American flag use stars to represent the states? In The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation (U Virginia Press,…
Aug 21, 2026 · 1:38:00
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books…
Aug 19, 2026 · 1:08:23
What do we talk about when we talk about Europe? Is it defined by geography? Or is it politics, or shared culture? In Europe: A New History (Allen Lane, 2026), award-winning…
Aug 18, 2026 · 44:53
The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens…
Aug 15, 2026 · 59:39
A leading historian’s revelatory exploration of antisemitism in the United States—from 1940s anti-Jewish riots until today—showing that it has long served as a frontline in our…
Aug 14, 2026 · 29:28
A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare…
Aug 13, 2026 · 56:41
250 years ago when the United States declared independence, Edward Gibbon across the ocean published the first volume of his magisterial series, The Decline and Fall of the Roman…
Aug 13, 2026 · 1:01:05
This is a really good book. Really good . Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a fascinating, and perhaps unexpected,…
Aug 12, 2026 · 52:29
The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure…
Aug 12, 2026 · 47:42
Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been historically revered throughout the Islamic tradition. This began already in the Qur'an, where she is called by the name "Maryam." The Islamic…
Aug 12, 2026 · 32:38
John Ross chats with repeat guest Tim McGirk about Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BC), the Father of Chinese History. He earned this accolade for his monumental work, the Shiji (usually…
Aug 12, 2026 · 1:10:02
Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black…
Aug 11, 2026 · 38:35
We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own…
Aug 9, 2026 · 59:20
Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums (Cornell University Press, 2026) reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land…
Aug 8, 2026 · 1:16:57
The definitive feminist analysis of reproductive and ‘caring’ labor to emerge from Italian feminism of the 1970s. Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the…
Aug 7, 2026 · 46:27
Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society is the latest book from Dr Andres Saenz De Sicilia, an Assistant Professor of…
Aug 7, 2026 · 1:28:28
Republicanism is arguably the most powerful political idea in history, an extraordinary feat of human imagination that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility.…
Aug 1, 2026 · 42:31
In Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), historian Dr. Vaneesa Cook examines the history of the Empire State Building and the…
Jul 31, 2026 · 30:44
In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Mikhail Pelevin about his book Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs,…
Jul 30, 2026 · 57:25
Today I'm speaking with Steven K. Green, Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History and Religious Studies at Willamette University. We are discussing his…
Jul 29, 2026 · 1:25:15
When Jews plunged into the world of politics en masse at the beginning of the 20th century, a variety of new options were available to them. Two of the leading figures who…
Jul 29, 2026 · 37:55
The opening of Iraq's Ba'th Party archives revolutionized the study of Iraqi politics and history, offering scholars unprecedented access to the inner workings of one of the…
Jul 25, 2026 · 58:02
Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of the communities of Eastern Europe. Their approach largely combined the ideas of traditional Ashkenazi…
Jul 24, 2026 · 1:05:12
Black Power! A name with a ring to it on both sides of the Atlantic, taken as a sign of Black American rage incarnated by a few names: Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, the Black…
Jul 24, 2026 · 41:02
In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast, I sat down with Mikuláš Pešta to talk about his new book, Student Internationalism and the Global Cold War: The International…
Jul 21, 2026 · 1:23:06
Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. R. Joseph Parrott explores how anti-colonial…
Jul 21, 2026 · 1:07:53
Elad Lapidot is Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his…
Jul 21, 2026 · 58:28
Stealing the future and concealing the theft—capitalism’s method, as examined by the author of the acclaimed Carbon Democracy Today , extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from…
Jul 17, 2026 · 1:00:26
The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today (Catapult, 2025) delves into the forgotten history of eugenics and links…
Jul 13, 2026 · 1:04:13
Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he…
Jul 9, 2026 · 57:00
Freedom to Know: Creating Community with Ambedkar, Du Bois, Iqbal, Ramabai and Tagore (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) asks how a (world) community can be created to allow…
Jul 9, 2026 · 1:05:59
Today I'm speaking with Mordecai Kurz, Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University. We are discussing his latest book, Private Power and Democracy's…
Jul 9, 2026 · 49:35
What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings.…
Jul 6, 2026 · 1:04:39
Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new framework for interpreting interactions with classical source material in Macrobius’ Saturnalia.…
Jul 4, 2026 · 1:31:00
Tamil Buddhism and Brahminism in Modern India: Deep Resistance Against Caste (Oxford University Press, 2026) explores Tamil Buddhism in modern India, focusing on its emergence as…
Jul 2, 2026 · 41:59
Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her…
Jul 1, 2026 · 56:56
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton University Press, 2026) is the first major new edition of Paine’s works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking…
Jul 1, 2026 · 1:19:15
In preparation for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, it would be wise to look back at the ancient thinkers and writers who helped inspire its early leaders. Perhaps…
Jun 27, 2026 · 1:22:19
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, including in the Russian…
Jun 25, 2026 · 1:44:04
From the inside flap: “A rich resource of Deleuze’s research that is unavailable in his published writing Includes summaries of 216 seminar sessions available in transcripts and…
Jun 23, 2026 · 47:49
In Renaissance Italy, the gun was not only a tool of war but also a desirable object, a luxury item carried at court. Guns were in use on the battlefield by 1440; later in that…
Jun 21, 2026 · 1:21:45
He’s been called the man academics love to hate. One time, when the author disclosed that he worked with Pipes, the colleague responded, “I will forgive you.” Love him or hate…
Jun 18, 2026 · 52:39
The first book-length study on mythology reception in video games, Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines how video games…
Jun 17, 2026 · 1:14:01
American democracy is in a period of crisis, so it seems natural to look back to its origins. So here in Episode 10 of Season 5, I interview Professor Josiah Ober . Having…
Jun 14, 2026 · 53:13
"Self-Made" success is now an American badge of honor that rewards individualist ambitions while it hammers against community obligations. Yet, four centuries ago, our…
Jun 14, 2026 · 35:17
The relationship between the Church and the world has been a subject of debate since the Church's earliest days. In A Church for a Secular World: The Development of Klaas…
Jun 13, 2026 · 1:18:50
Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought…
Jun 11, 2026 · 36:07
Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India (Oxford UP, 2026) explores the role of languages in the intellectual landscape of…
Jun 10, 2026 · 46:52
John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a…
Jun 10, 2026 · 56:18
Athenian Democracy provides innovative readings of ancient theorists to reveal both the complexity of democracy's achievements and its limits. In Athenian Democracy: Modern…
Jun 9, 2026 · 1:08:51
What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the…
Jun 8, 2026 · 58:22
In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it…
Jun 8, 2026 · 1:34:05
Veiling meant many things to the ancients. On women, veils could signify virtue, beauty, piety, self-control, and status. On men, covering the head could signify piety or an…
Jun 3, 2026 · 47:34
The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical…
Jun 2, 2026 · 37:10
In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was accused of unspecified…
Jun 2, 2026 · 1:28:26
The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were sociologists, or at the very least precursors…
May 30, 2026 · 45:26
Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how…
May 30, 2026 · 1:06:29
From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writings on race that…
May 28, 2026 · 1:33:21
The Wisdom of the Ancients: Four Ideas That Changed the World (Oxford UP, 2025) is about four cornerstones of modern thought that were put in place by people living in the…
May 27, 2026 · 1:08:06
A rich and immersive reinterpretation of the history of Western thought, The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025)…
May 25, 2026 · 1:05:33
Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood. Timothy McCall's book Making the…
May 25, 2026 · 40:39
Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century…
May 22, 2026 · 1:03:24
What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? If you were doing math…
May 21, 2026 · 1:01:24
Codex Vaticanus is often regarded as a pillar of New Testament scholarship, ancient, authoritative, and decisive. In From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New…
May 20, 2026 · 1:03:11
A central paradox of democracies is that they are always ruled by elites. What can democracy mean in this context? Today, it is often said that a populist revolt against elites…
May 18, 2026 · 1:17:45
Carlos Martins joins the New Books Network to discuss his book Fascism: Beyond Hitler and Mussolini (Desassossego, 2022) (in Portuguese Fascismos: Para Além de Hitler e…
May 15, 2026 · 42:37
In Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind (Counterpoint Publishing, 2026), Dr. Paul Stob presents a tale of…
May 14, 2026 · 33:53
Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's…
May 12, 2026 · 47:53
The field of Strategic Studies, which studies the use and threat of force for political purposes, has seen the repeated rise of concepts to dominate discourses and research…
May 11, 2026 · 1:07:38
We were joined by Angus Burgin, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and talked about how the arrival of the Internet remade life and politics in the 90s.…
May 10, 2026 · 40:25
The 1960s in Japan have long been understood as a period of radical political engagement. But as political movements from Old Left Communism to New Left revolts appeared to fail…
May 4, 2026 · 1:02:23
While nationalism is a term that is often associated with instability, violence, extremism, terrorism, wars and even genocide, in fact most forms of nationalism are nonviolent.…
May 4, 2026 · 43:20
There was no more trenchant and substantive critic of the Left from the Left in the 1960s and 1970s than Bayard Rustin. Some liberals and leftists today valorize Rustin on the…
May 4, 2026 · 54:37
Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that…
May 2, 2026 · 1:06:45
A major new look at Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe. Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate…
May 2, 2026 · 45:06
In the mid-1930s the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont ventured into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their…
May 1, 2026 · 1:29:15
In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab cultures while navigating their…
Apr 30, 2026 · 46:19
The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Deirdre Loughridge & Dr. Thomas Patteson is a guided tour through centuries of instruments that never existed.…
Apr 29, 2026 · 1:07:56
For more than two centuries, economists and researchers have struggled with the conundrum of reconciling Adam Smith’s views on economics and ethics. While some held that Smith’s…
Apr 27, 2026 · 39:29
Stephen Sims’ New Atlantis essay examines how emerging technologies are reshaping the structure and authority of the modern nation-state. He argues that innovations such as…
Apr 25, 2026 · 46:33
The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tiffany Jo Werth explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in…
Apr 24, 2026 · 1:42:13
Today, I interview Vin Nardizzi, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, about his new monograph Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance (U Toronto…
Apr 23, 2026 · 42:21
The story behind the mythical figure of "the Wandering Jew" is one of the most fascinating tales in European history. In I, Wandering Jew , National Jewish Book Award-winning…
Apr 22, 2026 · 1:14:23
In this sixth episode of Season 5, I interview Mr. Chris Griswold . An alum of Wheaton College and Princeton Theological Seminary, he was formerly a senior advisor to then…
Apr 18, 2026 · 1:05:59
Humanities Theory (Oxford UP, 2026) pioneers a new topic: the theory of the humanities. It is an urgent topic right now because the humanities face a suite of forceful new…
Apr 17, 2026 · 57:26
Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who…
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