New Books in Intellectual History

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.

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Society & Culture
History
2976
Lilian Calles Barger, “The World Come of Age: A...
A searching and richly textured history of the affinities and common origins of Latin American and North American liberation theologies, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press 2018) dives into the...
54 min
2977
Nathan Kravis, “On the Couch: A Repressed Histo...
Sometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). In a live interview conducted in connection with the Manhattan Institute for P...
56 min
2978
Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observato...
Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the story of Ottoman Egypt and astronomy,
55 min
2979
Robert G. Ingram, “Reformation Without End: Rel...
Robert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subjects in eighteenth-century England didn’t know they were l...
40 min
2980
Sue Prideaux, “I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzs...
Like most philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is better known for his ideas than for the life he led. In I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), Sue Prideaux details the events of his life and shows how they can inform many of the c...
41 min
2981
Kiara M. Vigil, “Indigenous Intellectuals: Sove...
In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s,
51 min
2982
Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science an...
Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and as a dimension of imperialism through the development ...
57 min
2983
Michael G. Hanchard, “The Spectre of Race: How ...
Michael G. Hanchard’s new book The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a rich and complex examination of the question of discrimination in general,
40 min
2984
Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time M...
Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press,
69 min
2985
Stefan M. Wheelock, “Barbaric Culture and Black...
In Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic (University of Virginia Press, 2015), Dr. Stefan M. Wheelock analyses a little-discussed episode in the the late Enlightenment, namely,
51 min
2986
Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (M...
For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view is incorrect: even in California, for example,
65 min
2987
Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andrea...
The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of anyone working on the history of anatomy,
62 min
2988
Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twenti...
Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry “from below.
39 min
2989
Christopher Dietrich, “Oil Revolution: Anticolo...
The 1973 oil crisis was an event of world-historic proportions, but the stories we tell about it often center the Global North. For instance, the first images that probably come to mind are of the long gas-station queues of Americans in their cars wait...
49 min
2990
Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imper...
Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explorers, and American Indians created and circulated knowle...
40 min
2991
Irfan Ahmad, “Religion as Critique: Islamic Cri...
In the last few decades, questions relating to Islam’s compatibility with liberal secular democracy, or the question of why Islam remains incompatible with Western liberal norms of thought and politics have generated considerable commentary in both sch...
53 min
2992
Adam D. Hensley, “Covenant Relationships and th...
Was the Hebrew Psalter purposefully shaped and arranged by editors to convey a particular theological message? Adam Hensley says yes. By examining the relationship between the Davidic covenant and the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants,
48 min
2993
Ruth Gamble, “Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism...
Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tradition in Tibet, and the life of the Third Karmapa,
42 min
2994
John Kaag, “American Philosophy: A Love Story” ...
John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. American Philosophy: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) won the John Dewey Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Kaag offers a rich history,
43 min
2995
Luis Cortest, “Philo’s Heirs: Moses Maimonides ...
The tensions found between Reason and Revelation, between the traditions of the Bible and Greek thought, were central to pre-modern philosophy and in a sense remain so today. We live in an age beholden to both the religious and the secular as ways of u...
53 min
2996
Quinn Slobodian, “Globalists: The End of Empire...
The relationship between neoliberals and the state is one that has been endlessly debated. Are neoliberals anti-statist? Or are they advocates of a strong state? The seeming vagueness of neoliberalism has led some to even call for the word’s abolition....
76 min
2997
Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederi...
The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is one of the most written-about figures in American history. But not all aspects of Douglass’ thought have ...
75 min
2998
Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Dis...
How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by scholars of biomedicine as “molecularization” took plac...
32 min
2999
Scott Spector, “Modernism Without Jews?: German...
Was there anything particularly Modern about Modern Jews? Was there something characteristically Jewish about Modernism? In this episode, we hear from Scott Spector, professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan,
69 min
3000
Joseph Ben Prestel, “Emotional Cities: Debates ...
Joseph Ben Prestel talks with us about Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2017), blending together history of emotions, urban history, global history,
56 min