Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLawrence Douglas, "The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice" (Princeton UP, 2026)
The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a gripping account of how law has…
3 months, 1 week ago
Alex Law, "The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process" (Routledge, 2026)
The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were sociologists, o…
3 months, 1 week ago
Steven Nadler, "Spinoza, Atheist" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was…
3 months, 1 week ago
Annette Gordon-Reed ed., "Jefferson on Race: A Reader" (Princeton UP, 2026)
From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson…
3 months, 1 week ago
Christos Lynteris, "How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)
Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without bei…
3 months, 1 week ago
H. A. Drake, "The Wisdom of the Ancients: Four Ideas That Changed the World" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The Wisdom of the Ancients: Four Ideas That Changed the World (Oxford UP, 2025) is about four cornerstones of modern thought that were put in place…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Christopher S. Celenza, "The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
A rich and immersive reinterpretation of the history of Western thought, The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late A…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Matthieu Felt, "Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan" (Harvard UP, 2023)
Episode 142
Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recor…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Timothy McCall, "Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
Episode 60
Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood.
Timot…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Richard Elwes, "Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7" (Basic Books, 2026)
What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symb…
3 months, 2 weeks ago