New Books Podcasts

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist…

The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first p…

Does a strong state mean a weak market? This is a common misconception amongst economists. Many view the state as either taxing and regulating the market too much or too little. However, the truth is that state capacity is just not well conceptualized in economic theory. James A. Robinson is a political scientist, economist, and professor at the Un…

If you’ve visited Thailand even for a short time you’ve probably been given, or have come across, some basic instructions on dos and don’ts — where to put, or not to put, your hands and feet, what to wear or not to wear to a temple, why not to get angry in public, that sort of thing. Perhaps you’ve wondered about the pedagogies that give these soci…

Charles Kindleberger ranks as one of the twentieth century's best known and most influential international economists. This book traces the evolution of his thinking in the context of a 'key-currency' approach to the rise of the dollar system, here revealed as the indispensable framework for global economic development since World War II. Unlike mo…

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Stefano Pelaggi, Adjunct Professor at Sapienza University in Rome. The two discuss Dr Pelaggi’s most recent book, L’Isola Sospesa. Taiwan e Gli Equilibri del Mondo (The Suspended Island: Taiwan and the Balance of the World) published by LUISS University Press in 2022. In this engaging chat, Dr …

Booker Prize shortlister Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, joins Penn State professor Magalí Armillas-Tisyera and host Chris Holmes to talk about her most recent novel, Our Share of Night, her first to be translated into English. Our Share of Night follows a spiritual medium, Juan, who can com…

Monica Macias, the youngest daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s first president at just seven years old, lands in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1979. Her father had sent her to the country to study, but what was meant to be a shorter visit grew to a decade-long stay when her father was ousted in a coup. Monica stays in Pyongyang until 1994, when she gradua…

The routinization of non-invasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) raises urgent questions about disability rights and reproductive justice. Supporters defend NIPT on the grounds that genetic information about the fetus helps would-be parents make better family planning choices. Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice challenges t…

Did we miss a fork in the road somewhere? What if our lives are going just fine, but we still want to hunt for the pieces of ourselves we’ve dropped along the way? Is it too late to claim more for ourselves? CEO and author Alisha Fernandez Miranda joins us to talk about what she gained by loosening her grip on deliverables, deadlines, and external …

The Archive Undying (Tordotcom, 2023) is Emma Mieko Candon’s ambitious epic science fiction novel about intertwined human survivors following the violent fall of cities run by AI entities so massive, they had the power and influence of gods. When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its ci…

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham UP, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was…

This episode features Professor Simon Ville talking about his latest book with David Merrett International Business in Australia Before World War One: Shaping a Multinational Economy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022). This book challenges conventional wisdom by revealing an extensive and heterogeneous community of foreign businesses in Australia before 19…

In this episode of International Horizons, Valerie Rosoux, Research Director at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) discusses the disagreements in the historiography of Belgium's human rights violations during its colonial activities in Congo, and how Belgium's case differs from those of Netherlands and France in coming to terms with th…

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not…

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) is perhaps the most iconised historical figure in India. Born into a caste deemed ‘unfit for human association’, he came to define what it means to be human. How and why did Ambedkar, who revered and cited the Gita till the 1930s, turn against Hinduism? What were his quarrels with Gandhi and Savarkar? Why did he c…

Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo on the US-Mexico border, as well as in how the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are used to delineate the limits of US territory. In stark contrast to this divisive view, Afro-diasporic religio…

Climate change is one of the most hotly contested environmental topics of our day. To answer criticisms and synthesize available information, scientists have been driven to devise increasingly complex models of the climate system. John D. Aber's Less Heat, More Light: A Guided Tour of Weather, Climate, and Climate Change (Yale UP, 2023) conveys tha…

Part 2 focuses on the play’s key interpretive questions: how we are invited to judge the central characters. Is Caesar, in Shakespeare’s story, really a tyrant who needed to be killed? Is Brutus a noble political hero or a misguided egoist? With Professor Michael Dobson, you’ll discover how Shakespeare restructured this familiar story to make easy …

What do financial bubbles and religious millenarianism have in common? They both involve collective delusion. When Charles Mackey wrote a book on the Madness of Crowds in the 19th century, he could not have imagined that religious and financial bubbles will continue to reappear, but as Willam Bernstein points out, the world has not gotten any saner…

The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through …

July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark--already a tinderbox, became a hotbed of protest and retaliation. Over five long days, 26 people were killed by police gunfire and hundreds more were injured, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in property damage was caused. …

In this episode of Queer Voices I talk to Joel Lafayette Fletcher III about his book With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life (UP of Mississippi, 2023) About the Author: Joel Lafayette Fletcher, III served as an officer in the US Navy and lived abroad for a dozen years. He co-owned a language school in Florence, Italy, and worked in the…

A New York Times bestselling Biblical scholar, reveals why our popular understanding of the Apocalypse is all wrong—and why that matters. You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and ve…

How can sociology help us understand art and music? In The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music: New Directions and New Discoveries (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), the editor Lisa McCormick, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, draws together the latest research in cultural sociology that examines art and music. Global in scope…

"We act like children with our dead," Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: "confused, / as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die." In poem after devastating poem, Kruk confronts what we would prefer not to see: "a person runs toward a bullet/ with a wooden shield and a warm heart..…

Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2022) is an innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the conne…

Today I talked to Michaela Chamberlain, author of Misogyny in Psychoanalysis (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022) Chamberlain’s book is a product of “cumulative trauma” whose original starting point was an interest in in menstruation where, in psychoanalytic literature filled with papers on “micturition and feces”, there is a “startling lack of writing…

In the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing initiated a fierce lawsuit over his large estate. Before Shamama’s riches could be disbursed among his aspiring heirs, Italian courts had to decide which law to apply to his estate—a matter that depended on his nationality.…

In Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022), Reyhan Durmaz offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectiv…

Ed Mitchell’s journey in the barbeque business began in 1991 with a lunch for his mama, who was grieving the loss of Ed’s father. Ed drove to the nearby Piggly Wiggly to buy a thirty-five-pound pig—that’s a small one—and fired up the coals. As smoke filled the air and the pork skin started to crackle, the few customers at the family bodega started …

In the lead-up to World War II, the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism in Europe foreshadowed Hitler's genocidal campaign against Jews. But the horrors of the Holocaust were not limited to the concentration camps of Europe: antisemitic terror spread through Vichy French imperial channels to France's colonies in North Africa, where in the force…