Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchWalter Scheidel, "What Is Ancient History?" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Episode 1
It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of ext…
1 year, 2 months ago
Kirin Narayan, "Cave of My Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Episode 575
On the podcast today I am joined by Kirin Narayan, emerita professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Ki…
1 year, 2 months ago
Lizzie Wade, "Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures" (Harper, 2025)
Episode 373
A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that …
1 year, 2 months ago
Graham Harman and Christopher Witmore, "Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology" (Polity Press, 2023)
Episode 17
Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the arc…
1 year, 3 months ago
J. P. Mallory, "The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution Is Rewriting Their Story" (Thames & Hudson, 2025)
Episode 158
Today the number of native speakers of Indo-European languages across the world is approximated to be over 2.6 billion—about 45 percent of the Earth’…
1 year, 3 months ago
Emily Hauser, "Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It" (Univ of Chicago Press, 2025)
Episode 157
Achilles. Agamemnon. Odysseus. Hector. The lives of these and many other men in the greatest epics of ancient Greece have been pored over endlessly i…
1 year, 4 months ago
Andrew Smith, "First People: The Lost History of the Khoisan" (Jonathan Ball, 2022)
Episode 156
First people communities are the early groups of hunter gatherers, herders, and the oldest human lineages of Africa, some migrating from as far as Ea…
1 year, 4 months ago
Robert Garland, "What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Episode 155
A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Robert…
1 year, 4 months ago
Richard D. Oram, "A Land Won from Waste: Scotland AD 400-1400" (Birlinn, 2025)
Episode 154
Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland …
1 year, 5 months ago
Annalisa Marzano, "Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome" (Cambridge UP. 2022)
Episode 48
Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Annalisa Marzano investigates the cultural and political dimens…
1 year, 5 months ago