Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMikhail Shishkin, "My Russia: War Or Peace?" (RiverRun Press, 2023)
Episode 241
In his timely My Russia: War or Peace? (RiverRun Press, 2023), Mikhail Shishkin provides a searing account of Russian political culture that explains…
3 years, 2 months ago
Mongol Nomadism, Mongol Identity, and the Fall of the Mongol Empire
Episode 29
In part two of our conversation about his book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), Nicholas …
3 years, 2 months ago
Sofia Samatar, "The White Mosque: A Memoir" (Catapult, 2022)
Episode 140
In the late 19th century, a group of Mennonites leave Russia for what is now Uzbekistan. Driven out by Russian demands that the pacifist group make t…
3 years, 3 months ago
Anna Schur, "The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
Episode 239
The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia (Northwestern UP, 2022) explores the fraught relationship between writers…
3 years, 3 months ago
Frank Costigliola, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Episode 1329
The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most co…
3 years, 3 months ago
Simon Dreher and Wolfgang Mueller, "Foreigners in Muscovy: Western Immigrants in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Russia" (Routledge, 2023)
Episode 238
This interview delves into a book that is indebted to the scholarly work with which New Books Network founder, Marshall Poe, began his career: ‘A Peo…
3 years, 3 months ago
Socialist Cultures and Politics of Secularism and Atheism
Episode 237
Two new books on secularism and atheism in German and Soviet socialist cultures are reshaping scholarly understandings of the relationship between so…
3 years, 3 months ago
New Histories of Violence in and around the Second World War
Episode 236
Why does state-led and intercommunal violence occur? How do past episodes of mass violence reverberate in the present? How do victims and perpetrator…
3 years, 3 months ago
Doug Enaa Greene, "Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union" (Lexington, 2023)
Episode 172
As capitalism’s popularity wanes and socialism’s popularity increases, there remains a massive shadow cast by the history of actually existing social…
3 years, 3 months ago
James H. Meyer, "Red Star over the Black Sea: Nazim Hikmet and His Generation" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 217
Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured internationa…
3 years, 3 months ago