New Books in Intellectual History

Feb 02 2025 1000 ep. 58 mins 2.6k
New Books in Intellectual History Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Intellectual History about their New Books

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Sara Burdorff, "Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)

Feb 02 2025 38 mins  
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

Moritz Mihatsch and Michael Mulligan, "Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice" (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025)

Feb 02 2025 69 mins  
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, soverei

Amanda Lagji, "Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time: Waiting for Now" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

Feb 01 2025 47 mins  
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 o

Ramachandra Guha, "Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism" (Yale UP, 2024)

Feb 01 2025 65 mins  
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

Tolkien, Philosopher of War: A Conversation with Graham McAleer

Jan 30 2025 50 mins  
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 metaphy

Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 30 2025 38 mins  
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

Peter Brian Barry, "George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Jan 29 2025 68 mins  
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

Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Jan 27 2025 51 mins  
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

Udo Hock, "The Mysterious Messages of the Other: On the Work of Jean Laplanches" (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2024)

Jan 26 2025 72 mins  
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 fr

Michael Sonenscher, "After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Jan 26 2025 70 mins  
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 di