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. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
Latest episodes
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1 h 13
Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs with Michael Doan (AK Press, 2026…
In Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs (AK Press, 2026), Michael Doan explores the work and legacy of James and Grace Lee Boggs, two of the…
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47 min
Carceral Utopia: A Global History of Model Prisons with Gregory Salle (Polity, 2026)
What underpins the legitimacy of the prison system in the twenty-first century? Despite numerous challenges and setbacks, there is still a widespread belief that prisons can be imp…
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1 h 10
A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity with Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïch…
A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity (Cornell UP, 2026) focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentie…
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60 min
Revolutionary Ink: New York Printers and the Promise of Democracy, 1693-1804 with Mark J. Noonan (Cambridge UP…
In Revolutionary Ink: New York Printers and the Promise of Democracy, 1693-1804 (Cambridge UP, 2026), my guest Mark J. Noonan explores the careers of New York printers whose presse…
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41 min
Fascists of the World, Unite?: A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s with Martin Kristoffer Hamre…
Fascists of the World, Unite?: A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) analyzes the ideas and forms of international cooperation between Fa…
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13 min
In Praise of Agnes Heller (1929-2019)
Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camara…
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55 min
First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism with Teresa M. Bejan (Harvard UP, 2026)
Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from us,…
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40 min
Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution with Sarah M. S. Pearsall (Doubleday, 2026…
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • In a groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, a prize-winning historian shines a light on…
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1 h 06
Realism After the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel with Rafael Walker (U Chicago Press…
The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisdom—is entr…
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23 min
The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and the Discoveries That Changed Our World with Barry R Davis (JHU Pr…
What drives someone to challenge the status quo to prevent disaster? In The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and the Discoveries That Changed Our World with Barry R Davis (JH…
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39 min
Europe in the Eleventh Century: Beyond Revolution and Reform with Charles West (Oxford UP, 2025)
Eleventh-century Europe was diverse and fast-changing. Historians have often debated this change through two sets of competing arguments, one about the shifting role of the Church…
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1 h 01
Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing with Katherine L. Alexander (U Mi…
Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Katherine L. Alexander explores how one late Qing Confucian reformer sought…
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40 min
The Technocratic International: Experts and the Making of a World from Nowhere with Jan Eijking (Oxford UP, 20…
Most international organisations today-from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the World Health Organisation-present themselves as technical institutions separate fro…
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1 h 07
Think of England: Nation, People, and Race in the English Imagination with Paul Kléber Monod (Cambridge UP, 20…
What is the basis of English national identity? How has this changed over time, and what is its future? Tracing the history of English identity over more than 2,000 years, Think of…
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43 min
Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions with Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, and Ezekiel J. Dixon-Romá…
What does it mean to learn when algorithms increasingly shape how knowledge is produced, organized, and interpreted? Editors Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, and Ezekiel J…
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1 h 03
The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries with Andrew Hui (Princeton UP, 2026)
With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable…
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48 min
Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession with Nicolas Guilhot (Harvard UP, 2026)
Pundits, scholars, and the general public alike have argued that conspiratorial thinking is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. In Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obse…
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42 min
Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination with N.S. Gundur
Engages with the life and ideas of the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu. In his last, profoundly innovative work Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagi…
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45 min
Aarthi Vadde has a Platform (JP)
It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respon…
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50 min
Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism with Jeffrey Champlin (U Toronto Press, 2025)
Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism (U Toronto Press, 2025) examines the deep historical roots of fundamentalism in Protestantism and the imaginative traditions of Romantic…