Podcast Episodes

Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Political theorist Alisa Kessel (University of Puget Sound) has an important and impressive new book, Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistenc…

1 month, 3 weeks ago

Devika Dutt et al., "Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction" (Polity Press, 2025)

Decolonization has long been debated across the social sciences, but the economics discipline has so far avoided such critical engagement. Decolonizi…

1 month, 3 weeks ago

Lisa Siraganian, "The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots" (Verso, 2026)

Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of per-sonhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protect…

1 month, 3 weeks ago

Donald Sassoon, "Revolutions: A New History" (Verso Books, 2025)

Revolutions: A New History (Verso Books, 2025) is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in term…

1 month, 3 weeks ago

Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era

Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans c…

1 month, 3 weeks ago

Decolonizing the Novum

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the …

1 month, 3 weeks ago

Jasper Bernes, "The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising" (Verso Books, 2025)

How might a twenty-first-century revolution against class society succeed?

Communism comes from the future, but its hopes haunt our past. Reading rev…

1 month, 3 weeks ago

Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Panini’s Ashtadyayi is one of the most famous works in Sanskrit, a so-called “linguistic machine” that, through its 4,000 words, allows someone to ge…

1 month, 4 weeks ago

Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark S…

1 month, 4 weeks ago

Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – …

1 month, 4 weeks ago