Podcast Episodes

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands …

Published on 2 weeks, 5 days ago

Maja Davidović, "Governing the Past: 'Never Again' and the Transitional Justice Project" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

The way we govern the past to ensure peaceful futures keeps conflict anxieties alive. In pursuit of its own survival, permanence and legitimacy, the project of transitional justice, designed to put t…

Published on 3 weeks, 3 days ago

Maria Bach, "Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Originating in the Nineteenth Century, the European idea of development was shaped around the premise that the West possessed progressive characteristics that the East lacked. As a result of this per…

Published on 3 weeks, 5 days ago

Sarah F. Derbew, "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Episode 326

Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read…

Published on 4 weeks ago

Ithamar Theodor, "The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

The Bhagavad Gita is a world classic often considered to be not just the 'Hindu Bible' but sometimes the 'Indian Bible' as well. Over the last two centuries, it has attracted much scholarly attention…

Published on 1 month ago

Verena Halsmayer on Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow’s Model as an Artifact

Episode 109

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, chats with Verena Halsmeyer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna, about her recent, award-winning book, Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow’s Model as…

Published on 1 month ago

Killian Clarke, "Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule?

Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence f…

Published on 1 month, 1 week ago

Thomas Morel, "Underground Mathematics: Craft Culture and Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thomas Morel joins Jana Byars to tell the story of subterranean geometry, a forgotten discipline that developed in the silver mines of early modern Europe, talking about his book Underground Mathemat…

Published on 1 month, 1 week ago

David Boyk, "Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentiet…

Published on 1 month, 1 week ago

Jennifer Yip, "Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

How did China’s Nationalists feed their armies during the long war against Japan? In her new book, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jenn…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago