New Books in Western European Studies

Feb 02 2025 2270 ep. 57 mins 1.2k
New Books in Western European Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Western Europe about their New Books

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Blessin Adams, "Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain" (HarperCollins, 2025)

Feb 02 2025 32 mins  
Early Modern Britain was awash with pamphlets, ballads, woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning female poisoning lacing the supper with deadly substances; of child killers and spiteful witches, stories of women wholly and unnaturally wicked. These were printed or sung, tacked the walls of alehouses, sold in the streets for pennies an

Adam Franklin-Lyons, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" (Penn State Press, 2022)

Jan 30 2025 61 mins  
Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam Franklin-Lyons applies contemporary understandings of complex human disasters, vulnerability

Elizabeth Campbell, "Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 29 2025 58 mins  
Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting

Roland Erne et al., "Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Jan 28 2025 64 mins  
Year 2008 marked the introduction of a new economic governance regime in the European Union (EU) in response to the global financial crisis. Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency (Cambridge UP, 2024), authored by leading scholars in the field and also available open access, uses a approach to capture t

Philip Rathgeb, "How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 28 2025 56 mins  
Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford UP, 2024) shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Eu

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

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

Terrence C. Petty, "Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

Jan 24 2025 60 mins  
After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were hired to work for newly formed government agencies to get the new republic quickly on its feet. But there was an enormous flaw in the plan: no serious vetting system was put in place to keep war criminals out of government positions.

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

Jan 24 2025 87 mins  
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 Frenc

Matthew McCormack, "Shoes and the Georgian Man" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Jan 24 2025 39 mins  
Shoes are everyday objects but they are loaded with meaning. Shoes and the Georgian Man (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Matthew McCormack reveals how shoes played a powerful role in the wider story of shifts in gender relations in 18th-century Britain. It focuses on the relationship of shoes with the body and its movements, and therefore how what we wear on our feet relates closely to so