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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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65:43

Davide Panagia, "Sentimental Empiricism: Politics,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/06

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers

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47:23

We Are Free to Change the World: A Conversation on...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/05

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, we sit down with Lindsay Stonebridge, author of We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (Hogarth, 2024) to explore the enduring relevance of Hannah Arendt’s thought. Stonebridge dives into Arendt’s remarkable ability to teach students how to think, not just what to think, and reflects on Arendt’s own intellectual journey—a mind in constant dialogue with itself. We discuss how Arendt’s conception of thinking serves as a

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67:45

Vittorio Bufacchi, "Why Cicero Matters" (Bloomsbury,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/04

Why Cicero Matters (Bloomsbury, 2023) shows us how the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius, better known as Cicero, can help realize a new political world. His impact on humanitarianism, the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers of America is immense. Yet we give Julius Caesar all our attention. Why? What does this say about modern politics and political culture?This book gives us Cicero as an antidote to the myth of the strong man of history. Reading Cicero's On Duties alongside two

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46:15

Ayesha Jalal, "Muslim Enlightened Thought in South...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/04

In Ayesha Jalal’s latest work Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia (Routledge, 2024) readers are introduced to the “roshan khayali” (enlightened thought) of South Asian Muslim thinkers spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In the course of eleven chapters Jalal highlights the contributions of diverse Muslim voices to debates about reason, religion, liberality, belonging, and ideology. Familiar South Asian Muslim figures including Mirza Ghalib, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad

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64:24

Cyrus Ali Zargar, "The Ethics of Karbala: Myths,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/03

The Ethics of Karbala: Myths, Modernity, and Virtues of Nobility (Routledge, 2024) investigates the relationship between sacred narratives and the development of character. Focusing on the warrior ethos expressed in accounts of the Battle of Karbala, Zargar searches for the place of the martial virtues in modern life and warfare. This book is the first of its kind in taking a virtue ethics approach to the study of Islamic history. It offers an ethical analysis of arguably the most pivotal moment in

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38:13

Sara Burdorff, "Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/02

Sara Burdorff joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Maternity, Monstrosity and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare (Amsterdam University Press, 2025). This work uses an adaptation of monster theory to rethink the foundations of epic-heroic immortality. Rather than focusing on a specific monster or monsters, the author identifies the "belly-monstrous" as a crucial point of intersection between mothers and warriors in traditional narratives of the Trojan War. Identifying the

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69:58

Moritz Mihatsch and Michael Mulligan, "Shifting...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/02

Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. Shifting Sovereignties shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered

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65:15

Ramachandra Guha, "Speaking with Nature: The Origins...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/01

From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world.By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, “too poor to be green.” In Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (Yale UP, 2024), Ramachandra Guha challenges this narrative by revealing a virtually unknown prehistory of the global

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47:07

Amanda Lagji, "Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/02/01

Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time: Waiting for Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) by Dr. Amanda Lagji reveals the fundamental, constitutive role of the temporal dimensions of waiting in colonial regimes of time, as well as in postcolonial framings of time, history and agency. Drawing from critical time and postcolonial studies alike, this book argues that the temporality of waiting is an essential concept to theorise the relationship between time and power in postcolonial fiction across the

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50:48

Tolkien, Philosopher of War: A Conversation with...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/30

In this episode, we explore the profound philosophical and theological dimensions of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, particularly his views on war. In his book Tolkien, Philosopher of War (Catholic University of America Press, 2024), McAleer uncovers Tolkien's critique of Enlightenment thought and his deep concern with the apocalyptic politics of his time. He argues that Tolkien’s metaphysical, political, and aesthetic views—shaped by a rejection of gnosticism, a defense of monarchy, and a resistance to

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38:12

Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/30

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that

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68:39

Peter Brian Barry, "George Orwell: The Ethics of...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/29

George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell's written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and

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51:37

Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/27

How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the career of German polymath Johann Daniel Major (1634–93), Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Vera Keller uncovers how late seventeenth-century scholars crafted the research university as a haven for critical inquiry in defiance of political and economic pressures

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70:22

Michael Sonenscher, "After Kant: The Romans, the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/26

In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge

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72:24

Udo Hock, "The Mysterious Messages of the Other: On...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/26

Udo Hock's Die rätselhaften Botschaften des Anderen. Zum Werk Jean Laplanches (The enigmatic messages of the other. On the work of Jean Laplanche), came out in 2024 with Psychosozial-Verlag, and collectes nine essays that Hock published over the past twenty years. Published in 2024 to celebrate Laplanche's centennial, these papers are a crucial contribution to Laplanche studies from one of its key actors. Hock is not only a reader and commentator of Laplanche, but also an editor and translator of

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70:04

Richard Bourke, "Hegel’s World Revolutions"...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/25

G.W.F. Hegel was widely seen as the greatest philosopher of his age. Ever since, his work has shaped debates about issues as varied as religion, aesthetics and metaphysics. His most lasting contribution was his vision of history and politics. In Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton UP, 2023), Richard Bourke returns to Hegel’s original arguments, clarifying their true import and illuminating their relevance to contemporary society. Bourke shows that central to Hegel’s thought was his anatomy of the

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68:06

Alan Bollard, "Economists in the Cold War: How a...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/25

Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (Oxford UP, 2023) is an account of the economic drivers and outcomes of the Cold War, told through the stories of seven international economists, who were all closely involved in theory and policy in the period 1945-73. For them, the Cold War was a battle of economic ideas, a fight between central planning and market allocation, exploring economic thinking derived from the battle between Marxist and Capitalist

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87:53

Hélène Tessier, "Laplanche's Vocabulary" (PUF, 2024)

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/24

In Vocabulaire de Laplanche (PUF, 2024), edited by the renowned scholar and analyst, Hélène Tessier, several of the key readers of Jean Laplanche's work propose what is nothing short of a revelation for Laplanche studies. Theirs is a vocabulary that provides a concise and accessible dictionary of key Laplanchian terms, inviting readers of Laplanche's work to engage with the French psychoanalyst's work.In a wide-ranging conversation, professor Tessier delves into Laplanche's work, highlighting the

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54:01

Pierre Sokolsky, "The Clock in the Sun: How We Came...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/21

On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of the unchanging celestial realm, and it took observations through telescopes by Galileo and others to establish the reality

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96:52

Rafael Rachel Neis, "When a Human Gives Birth to a...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/01/20

When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (U California Press, 2023) investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours

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