What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey,

Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN, to successive attempts (both failed and successful) to...

The historical convergence of European imperialism and technological innovation in communication and travel made multiple social sites of intersection between the local and global possible. Nile Green, Professor of South Asian and Islamic history at UC...

It’s been a quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This anniversary marks a good occasion to ask a seemingly simple question: “What was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?” Was it Russia in a new wrapper?

Narratives of the Pacific War frequently examine the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf from the operational perspective, focusing on the desperate actions of the US Seventh Fleets escort carriers, Task Unit 77.4.3 (“Taffy 3”) against the much larger Japanese C...

Elizabeth Reich is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College in New London. Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2016) examines how,

In Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015), Carina E. Ray interrogates the intersections of race, marriage, gender and empire in this thought-provoking study that challenges t...

Today is the third of our occasional series on the question of how to respond to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I talked with Scott Straus and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Later in September I’ll talk with Carrie Booth Walling.

Since 2007, American photographer Jade Doskow has been documenting the remains of World’s Fair sites, once iconic global attractions that have often been repurposed for less noble aspirations or neglected and fallen into decay.

A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America’s fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US continue to be the only superpower in the international syste...

In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to I...

Is the scientific value of objectivity in conflict with the social justice commitment to diversity? In her latest book, Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2015),

In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers,

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globaliza...

Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International Communication at City University London, charts the beginnings of the format for TV shows,

If you want to know how to bring future mass atrocities to an end, the best place to start is to examine how past mass atrocities have ended. This simple piece of logic is at the heart of Bridget Conley-Zilkic’s new edited collection titled How Mass At...

Since the birth of the modern Olympics movement in the late nineteenth century, its leaders have attempted to maintain a strict separation of athletics and politics. Former International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage once stated,

In Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016), Dov Waxman, professor of political science, international affairs, and Israel studies at Northeastern University,

Cuban artists have been very productive this past decade, producing stunning and surprising works against a backdrop of political and economic transformation as well as continuing scarcity on the island. Planet/Cuba: Art,

This podcast is the first of a new occasional series of interviews addressing the question of responding to mass atrocities and genocide. Later in the summer I’ll interview Bridget Conley-Zilkic, James Waller and Carrie Booth Walling. First up,

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the Eas...

Since World War II, the United States has repeatedly posited itself as a defender of democracy, using its military might to promote freedom abroad even as it ascended to the status of the world’s only superpower.

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power,

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious ...

How does one “rethink and revise the key concepts of Hannah Arendt’s political theory in light of the struggles of asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants” (207)? In her new book Rightlessness in An Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Co...