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New Books in Intellectual History

New Books Network

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:

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61:51

Richard Calis, "The Discovery of Ottoman Greece:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/19

In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home in the university town of Tübingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orthodox alms-seekers. Ultimately, he gathered his research into a seminal work called the Turcograecia, which served for centuries as Europe’s foremost

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58:11

Rasheedah Phillips, "Dismantling the Master's Clock:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/18

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.Phillips unfolds the history of

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74:54

Eric Heinze, "Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/17

What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.” In Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left ( MIT Press, 2025), Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke

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49:51

Marc Shapiro, "Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/16

Rav Kook’s Vision: Halakhah, Secular Knowledge, and the Renewal of Judaism.Those of us who know something about Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook’s life and philosophy know about his being stuck outside of the Land of Israel during WWI, being the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, and his encouragement of the secular Zionists who turned swamps into vegetation. But not many of us have analyzed the personal notebooks that the Rav left, commonly known as Shemonah Kevatzim

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59:54

Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/15

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely?In Cartographies of Empire:

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29:32

Daniel Behar, "Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity"...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/14

Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh UP, 2025) examines a poetic movement that rose from under official state discourse in 1970s SyriaClosely examines a wealth of unknown primary poetic texts from Syria that make up a new poetics which challenges received ideas about modern Arabic poetry Rereads along transnational lines the works of famous Arabo-Syrian poets such as Nizār Qabbānī and Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ Offers a substantial rethinking of key terms in comparative literary

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35:03

Globalization's Backlash: Echoes of the Interwar Era...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/10

This week on International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey interviews historian Tara Zahra, author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (W.W. Norton, 2023). Zahra reflects on the historical parallels between the current backlash against globalization and the anti-globalist movements of the interwar period. She highlights how economic insecurity, the rise of mass politics, and anxieties over immigration and trade shaped political reactions in both eras,

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39:40

Nancy M. Rourke, "Ecological Moral Character: A...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/09

The images we use to think about moral character are powerful. They inform our understanding of the moral virtues and the ways in which moral character develops. However, this aspect of virtue ethics is rarely discussed.In Ecological Moral Character: A Catholic Model (Georgetown UP, 2024) , Nancy M. Rourke creates an ecological model through which we can form images of moral character. She integrates concepts of ecology with Aquinas' vision and describes the dynamics of a moral character in terms of

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54:58

Aaron Robertson, "The Black Utopians: Searching for...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/08

How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black?These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born,

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58:56

Paul Chrystal, "Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/07

Both humorous and shocking, Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome (Reaktion, 2025) by Paul Crystal is filled with astonishing facts and stories drawn from ancient Greece and Rome that have rarely been retold in English. It explores ‘the incredible’ as presented by little-known classical writers like Callimachus and Phlegon of Tralles. However, it offers much more: familiar authors such as Herodotus and Cicero often couldn’t resist relating sensational, tabloid-worthy

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56:34

Matthew Daniel Eddy, "Media and the Mind: Art,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/06

We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks

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70:06

Timothy Twining, "The Limits of Erudition: The Old...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/05

The history of early modern biblical scholarship has often been told as a teleological narrative in which a succession of radical thinkers dethroned the authority of the sacred word. The Limits of Erudition: The Old Testament in Post-Reformation Europe (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a very different story. Drawing on a mass of archival sources, Timothy Twining reconstructs the religious, cultural, and institutional contexts in which the text of the Old Testament was considered and contested throughout

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63:29

Judith Vitale, "The Historical Writing of the Mongol...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/04

Although Japan was never conquered by the Mongol empire, the 1274 and 1281 Mongol invasions were commemorated, remembered, and imagined in Japanese historical writings. How did history books, genealogies, gazetteers, local histories, and artworks represent the Mongol invasions? What role did the idea of the invasions play in the creation of cultural identity? In The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2024) Judith Vitale takes on these questions,

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38:20

Tithi Bhattacharya, "Ghostly Past, Capitalist...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/03

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal’s traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British

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30:27

Donald S. Prudlo, "Stimulus Pastorum: A Charge to...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/02

The work of St. Bartholomew of Braga, O.P. (1514-1590) appears here in English for the first time despite its long and enduring influence in ecclesiastical circles. His meditations on the office of pastor have provided critical insight bishops since their initial circulation and have helped form the most famous among them, including Bartholomew's proteges Charles Borromeo. Pope Paul VI ordered a copy of Bartholomew's work to be distributed among the Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council

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81:22

Nat Dyer, "Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/05/01

From the workings of financial markets to our response to the ecological crisis, economic theory shapes the world. But where do these ideas come from?Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray (Bristol University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating story of David Ricardo, Adam Smith’s only real rival as the ‘founder of economics’. The wealthiest stock trader of his day, Ricardo introduced the study of abstract models to economics. He also developed the theory of trade

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55:44

Laura Spinney, "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/04/30

Star. Stjarna. Setareh. Thousands of miles apart, humans look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see. Listen to these English, Icelandic, and Iranian words, and you can hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely, miraculous journeys. For all of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient source.In a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded outwards, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity

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64:40

Jeff Sebo, "The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/04/29

Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritize humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. As a result, we use hundreds of billions of vertebrates and trillions of invertebrates every year for a variety of purposes, often unnecessarily. We also plan to use animals, AI systems, and other nonhumans at even higher levels in the future. Yet as the dominant species, humanity has a responsibility to ask: Which nonhumans matter, how

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80:48

Russell Blackford, "How We Became Post-Liberal: The...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/04/28

Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this post-liberal climate, Russell Blackford asks whether liberalism is truly over. How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines how Western liberal democracies became nations where traditional liberal principles of toleration (religious and otherwise), individual liberty and freedom of speech are frequently dismissed

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51:02

Franck Billé, "Somatic States: On Cartography,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/04/27

In Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity (Duke UP, 2025), Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state and the body, particularly the visceral and affective attachment to the state and the symbolic significance of its borders. Billé argues that corporeal analogies to the nation-state are not simply poetic or allegorical but reflect a genuine association of the individual body with the national outline—an identification greatly facilitated by the emergence

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