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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3301
Paul L. Heck, “Skepticism in Classical Islam: M...
Skepticism is a familiar term to many of us conjuring up notions of doubt, uncertainty, and perhaps even unbelief. Yet, Skepticism did not always have such a narrow meaning. In fact Skepticism has helped formulate a number of important religious and in...
59 min
3302
Richard H. King, “Arendt and America” (U of Chi...
Richard H. King is Emeritus Professor of American and Canadian Studies at The University of Nottingham. His book Arendt and America (University of Chicago, 2015) is an intellectual biography and transnational synthesis of ideas and explores how the Ger...
69 min
3303
Am Johal, “Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and ...
The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relevant for the consideration of “the ecological question.
49 min
3304
Aaron W. Hughes, “Rethinking Jewish Philosophy:...
In Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), Aaron W. Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester, explores that paradox he sees at the heart of Jewis...
30 min
3305
Daniel Geary, “Beyond Civil Rights: The Moyniha...
Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. His book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) is a detail and illuminating analysis of the recept...
56 min
3306
Chike Jeffers, “Listening to Ourselves: A Multi...
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who famously made the decision in the 1970s to henceforth only produce his creative work in his native Gikuyu, rather than in English, authors the foreword to Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (SU...
75 min
3307
Edwin van de Haar, “Degrees of Freedom: Liberal...
“What exactly is liberalism?” The independent scholar Edwin van de Haar tackles this important question in his new book Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology (Transaction Publishers, 2015). Setting the record straight,
80 min
3308
James E. Strick, “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” (Ha...
“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were ...
67 min
3309
Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and t...
Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press,
73 min
3310
Minghui Hu, “China’s Transition to Modernity: T...
Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This story of Dai Zhen begins before his birth and ends aft...
63 min
3311
Gordon H. Chang, “Fateful Ties: A History of Am...
“There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be.” According to Gordon H. Chang‘s new book, the idea of “China” became “an ingredient within the developing identity of America itself.
69 min
3312
James Turner, “Philology: The Forgotten Origins...
James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers the significance of philology, the study of language,
64 min
3313
Mia E. Bay, et al., “Toward an Intellectual His...
Mia Bay is a professor of history at Rutgers University, and Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina, 2015).
59 min
3314
Emran El-Badawi, “The Qur’an and the Aramaic Go...
The Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (Routledge, 2013) written by Emran El-Badawi, professor and director of the Arab Studies program at the University of Houston, is a recent addition to the field of research on the Qur’an and Aramaic and Syri...
68 min
3315
Barry Allen, “Vanishing into Things: Knowledge ...
What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue that’s as much...
63 min
3316
Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sp...
How is “the public sphere” best conceptualized on a transnational scale? Nancy Fraser (The New School for Social Research) explores this pressing question in her book Transnationalizing the Public Sphere (Polity, 2014).
68 min
3317
Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women a...
According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredible women, Meredith K.
61 min
3318
Kocku von Stuckrad, “The Scientification of Rel...
Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change,
53 min
3319
James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and...
James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Universi...
64 min
3320
Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decoloni...
Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Un...
59 min
3321
M. Alper Yalcinkaya, “Learned Patriots: Debatin...
What were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science? In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. Alper Yalcinkaya‘s new book Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State,
69 min
3322
Kevin M. Schultz, “Buckley and Mailer: The Diff...
In Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 2015), Kevin M. Schultz has given us a lively and colorful narrative history that captures the character of two complex men and the times in which they lived.
67 min
3323
Marion Holmes Katz, “Women in the Mosque: A His...
Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ‘may a Muslim woman go to the mosque,
67 min
3324
Emily Kuriloff, “Contemporary Psychoanalysis an...
In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the n...
51 min
3325
Amy Kittelstrom, “The Religion of Democracy: Se...
Amy Kittelstrom is an associate professor of history at Sonoma State University. In her book The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (Penguin Press, 2015), Kittelstrom gives us profiles of seven individual and their c...
64 min