Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBeatrice Heuser, "War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Episode 224
War is often thought of mainly the concern of professional soldiers and maybe politicians as well. However, philosophers and theorists of varying typ…
2 years, 6 months ago
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Episode 172
The East India Company was a unique entity in world history: More than just a commercial enterprise, the Company tried to act as its own government. …
2 years, 6 months ago
Eugenio Refini, "Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy" (Legenda, 2022)
Episode 26
As per William Shakespeare, ‘all the world’s a stage’. But what if the human soul was a stage too? What if the stage of the world and the stage of th…
2 years, 6 months ago
James R. Fichter, "Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Episode 246
In Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Bo…
2 years, 6 months ago
Nicholas Radburn, "Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2023)
Episode 432
During the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by th…
2 years, 6 months ago
Camillo Leonardi, "Speculum Lapidum: A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones" (Penn State UP, 2023)
Episode 62
First published in Venice in 1502, Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum Lapidum is an encyclopedic summary of all classical and medieval sources of lithothera…
2 years, 6 months ago
Catherine Powell-Warren, "Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Episode 61
Jana Byars speaks with Catherine Powell-Warren about Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Netw…
2 years, 6 months ago
Cassander L. Smith, "Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic" (LSU Press, 2023)
Episode 431
Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic (LSU Press, 2023) by Dr. Cassander L. Smith examines the means through which people of African des…
2 years, 6 months ago
Jessica Goethals, "Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
Episode 25
The Roman singer, courtesan, and writer Margherita Costa won prominence and fame across the courts of Italy and France during the mid-seventeenth cen…
2 years, 6 months ago
Hwisang Cho, "The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea" (U Washington Press, 2020)
Episode 511
The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter…
2 years, 6 months ago