Over the past century, virtually every Iranian—whether living in Iran or in the diaspora—has been exposed, to one degree or another, to certain commonly held nationalistic beliefs about what it means to be Iranian.

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable,

Kevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Colleen Murphy’s new book, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2017), argues that attaining some degree of justice is possible in nations transitioning to democratic states.

Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellions in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Sep...

In her new book, Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), award-winning writer Mandy Sayer explores the neglected history of Gypsies, or Romani people, in Australia, from the earliest European settlement until today.

The idea of being a “political prisoner” may seem timeless. If someone was imprisoned for his or her political beliefs, then that person is in some sense a “political prisoner.” Think of the Tower of London and its various occupants. But,

Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents readers with the connected histories of military cadres and intellectuals in Peru and Spain c.

Marie Grace Brown’s Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017) is in many ways a history of fashion in Sudan, but in so many ways, its much more than that. It is the story of women in Sudan,

What was the British abolition of the slave trade like in practice? Padraic Scanlan, in his beautifully-written first book, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2017),

From the export of the Chicago Police Department’s interrogation experts to Iraq after 2003, to casual references of the US-Indian Wars by US soldiers in Vietnam, Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press,

Writers have long created networks and connections by exchanging letters or writing back to one another in their poetry and fiction. Letters between Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes,

The work of sociologist Norbert Elias has had a renaissance in recent times, with Steven Pinker, among others, using it to argue that interpersonal violence has declined globally as states have expanded and subdued restless populations.

I was joined by Pasquale Tridico, Professor of Political Economy at Roma Tre University in Italy. His latest book, Inequality in Financial Capitalism, was published by Routledge in 2017. The issue of inequality has regained attention in the economic an...

Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is the most recent work from distinguished historian Jack Greene. Using a treasure trove of records from the middle of the eighteenth century,

In his new book, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press 2016), Lawrence R. Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College examines t...

In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

In her new book, Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Jayne Persian, a Lecturer in History at the University of Southern Queensland, explores the history of mass migration of 170,

Just after World War II, West Indians began moving to London in large numbers. The artists, writers, and musicians among them found a place to create, and they found ways to express their complex notions of belonging to both the Caribbean and to the Br...

In her new book, Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change (Syracuse University Press, 2017), Karen Ross conducts an in-depth analysis of Jewish-Palestinian youth encounter peace-building programs in Israel.

Today we spoke to Gregory Mann about his book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Gregory Mann investigates how the effectiveness of government institutions declined in the...

Fashion is often dismissed as trivial, but Reina Lewis‘s Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015) takes both it and what Muslims specifically wear and devotes and 300+ eye-opening pages to it. Defining it as,

Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Yet, Kenyan officials and citizens often perceive them as a dangerous and alien presence, with attendant civil and human rights abuses.

Secularism is an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe. It is embodied in the conflict between secular republics—from the US to India—and the challenges they face from resurgent religious identity politics; ...

It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustration with the Bosnian peasants for not living up to their ...