New Books in British Studies
1,231 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Britain about their New Books
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Episodes
Jacqueline Kennelly, "Burnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
March 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBurnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life (University of Toronto Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Kennelly traces the political ascendance of neoliberalism and its effects on youth. The book explores democracy and citizenship as described in interviews with over forty young people – ages 16 to 30 – who have either experienced homelessness or identify as an activist, living in five liberal democracies: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the United K...
Jeremy Black, "The Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture, 1750-1900" (St. Augustine's Press, 2022)
March 09, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesHistorian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail--namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture. In The Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture, 1750-1900 (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), Black notes that the Gothic novel is also very much ab...
Priyasha Saksena, "Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia (Oxford UP, 2023), Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-old question of what constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere. She explores the history of sovereignty through an analysis of the jurisdictional politics involving the princely states of colonial South Asia. Governed by local rulers, these princely states were subject to British paramountcy whilst remaining legally distinct ...
Joanna Crosby, "Apples and Orchards Since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
March 05, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesShowing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, Apples and Orchards since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Joanna Crosby takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the importance of the apple as a symbol of both tradition and innovation. From the 18th century in Britain, technological innovation in fruit production and orchard man...
Derron Wallace, "The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesHow does race matter in schools? In The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth (Oxford UP, 2023), Derron Wallace, the Jacob S. Potofsky Chair in Sociology at Brandeis University, tells the contrasting stories of two schools in the UK and USA. The book demonstrates two very different sets of expectations for Black youth in the two countries schools, and two very different educational and social structures reinforcing these expectations. The book draws on a rich...
Jennifer Evans, "Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
March 02, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesHow did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Dr. Jennifer Evans presents a vivid history that investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In do...
Upal Chakrabarti, "Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
February 29, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territory's native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellion's suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to lo...
Christian R. Burset, "An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy" (Yale UP, 2023)
February 29, 2024 05:00 - 44 minutesIn An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Christian R. Burset presents a compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire. For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) as the world’s most powerful empire. At that point, imperial p...
Stanley Wells, "What Was Shakespeare Really Like?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
February 26, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesSir Stanley Wells is one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare. Here he brings a lifetime of learning and reflection to bear on some of the most tantalising questions about the poet and dramatist that there are. How did he think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? This freshly thought and immensely engaging study wrestles with fundamental debates concerning Shakespeare's personality and life. The mysteri...
Michael Johnston, "The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 24, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesMichael Johnston's The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500 (Oxford UP, 2023) addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Who copied and disseminated these diverse manuscripts? Who read the literary texts that they transmit? And what was the relationship between those copying literature and those reading it? To answer these questions, this...
Jacob Ward, "Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications" (MIT Press, 2024)
February 23, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesIn Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure. When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed...
Isabella Alexander, "Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesIsabella Alexander's book Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores the intertwined histories of mapmaking and copyright law in Britain from the early modern period up to World War 1, focusing chiefly on the 18th and 19th centuries. Taking a multidisciplinary approach and making extensive use of the archival record, this is the first detailed, historical account of the relationship between maps and copyright. As such, it...
Harriet Lyon, "Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesThe dissolution of the monasteries was recalled by individuals and communities alike as a seismic rupture in the religious, cultural, and socio-economic fabric of early modern England. It was also profoundly important in shaping contemporary historical consciousness, the topographical imagination, and local tradition. Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2021) by Dr. Harriet Lyon is a book about the dissolution of the monasteries a...
Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, "Tudor Networks of Power" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 21, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesTudor Networks of Power (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Ruth Ahnert & Dr. Sebastian Ahnert is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist specialising in complex networks. Together they have reconstructed and computationally analysed the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history (1509-1603), based on the British State Papers. The 130,000 letters that survive in the State Papers...
Isabel B. Taylor, "The Crown and Its Records: Archives, Access, and the Ancient Constitution in Seventeenth-Century England" (De Gruyter, 2023)
February 19, 2024 09:00 - 45 minutesArchives are popularly seen as liminal, obscure spaces -- a perception far removed from the early modern reality. In The Crown and Its Records: Archives, Access, and the Ancient Constitution in Seventeenth-Century England (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023), Isabel Taylor examines the central English archival system in the period before 1700 and highlights the role played by the public records repositories in furnishing precedents for the constitutional struggle between Crown and Parliament. This b...
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesImperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigorous and award-winning history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Dr. Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine indust...
Ian Saxine, "Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier" (NYU Press, 2019)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University, shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights. As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled ove...
Laura Flannigan, "Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
February 13, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesThe dawn of the Tudor regime is one of most recognisable periods of English history. Yet the focus on its monarchs' private lives and ministers' constitutional reforms creates the impression that this age's major developments were isolated to halls of power, far removed from the wider populace. Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Laura Flannigan presents a more holistic vision of politics and society in late mediaeval and...
Richard T. Rodríguez, "A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad" (Duke UP, 2022)
February 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (Duke UP, 2022), Richard T. Rodríguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodríguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Bauhaus, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pet Shop Boys. He recounts these bands’...
Florence Mok, "Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c.1966-97" (Manchester UP, 2023)
February 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFlorence Mok's book Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c.1966-97 (Manchester UP, 2023) is timely and exciting for those who are interested in colonial governance and autonomy of the colonial polity. This is a long-ignored area in which colonial historians have made major interventions. Moving away from the existing focus on theories by political scientists and sociologists, this book uses under-exploited archival and unofficial data in Lon...
Matthew Kruer, "Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America" (Harvard UP, 2021)
February 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourA gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America. In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist moveme...
Jessica Hinchy, "Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
February 05, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourUntil Jessica Hinchy’s latest book, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there was no single monograph dedicated to the history of the Hijra community. Perhaps this silence can bear the loudest testament of the marginalization this gender non-confirming community was subjected to under British colonial rule. This book is, therefore, important not only because of its efforts to humanize and situate this community amid the ...
The Culture Trap, with Sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesIn this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores "ethnic expectations" for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as "high-achieving," in London, they have been, conversely thought to be "chronically underachieving." Yet in each case the main cause -- of high ...
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesThe 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. Not many at the time–whether legislators or company officials in London, and certainly not Indian people—though this was a great idea. As Joshua Ehrlich notes in his book The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press: 2023), the Company hit upon a novel justification for its work: It was committed to the pursuit...
The Future of School Reform: A Discussion with Alison Colwell
January 31, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesEducationalists sometimes argue that the best way to improve a failing school is to appoint a strict principal or head, and this is sometimes the case. Not everyone agrees, of course, and many wonder what a strict principle or head actually does to improve student performance. In this interview, Owen Bennett Jones speaks with Alison Colwell, a woman the Daily Mail labelled Britain’s strictest head teacher. She turned a school around, and tells Bennett Jones how she did it. Colwell is the auth...
Why are there more women in parliament than ever before, and does it matter?
January 31, 2024 09:00 - 30 minutesWhy do some countries do better than others in advancing women as political leaders and in promoting women’s rights? And what difference does this make to women’s everyday lives? In this episode CEDAR’s Nic Cheeseman talks to Aili Mari Tripp, a world leading researcher of women’s movements, who explains why there are more women in parliament than ever before, and the role that gender quotas have played in this trend. We also discuss why some authoritarian governments gone to greater lengths t...
Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)
January 29, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesIn A Nasty Little War: The Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (Basic Books, 2024), award-winning reporter Anna Reid tells the extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution. In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia, with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bols...
Marcia Stephenson, "Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World" (U Texas Press, 2023)
January 27, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesCamelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans overhunted wild vicuña and guanaco and imposed husbandry and breeding practices that decimated llama and alpaca flocks that had been successfully tended by Indigenous peoples for generations. Yet the colonial encounter with these animals was not limited to the New World. Llamas Beyond the Andes: The Untold History of Camelids in the Modern Worl...
Renée Fox, "The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
January 27, 2024 09:00 - 35 minutesThe Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present’s desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions “necromantic lit...
Gregor Gall, "Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero " (Manchester UP, 2024)
January 27, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the summer of 2022, the little-known leader of a small union became a ‘working-class hero’. Facing down media pundits who thought they could walk all over him, he offered a robust critique of the government and provided workers with an authentic voice. At a time when the Labour Party was unable to articulate a credible alternative to the Tories, Mick Lynch spoke for the working class. Where did Lynch come from? How did he develop the skills and traits that make him such an effective spokes...
James R. Fichter, "Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773, two large shipments of tea from the East India Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North America. Their survival shaped the politics of the years ahead, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for the tea lost in Boston Harbor, and hinted at the enduring potency of consumerism in revolutionary politics. Tea prot...
Nicholas Radburn, "Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDuring the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into an Atlantic-wide system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year. In Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale UP, 2023), Nicholas Radburn explains how thousands of slaving merchants in Africa, Britain, and the British ...
Brian Gastle et al., "The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis" (Medieval Institute Press, 2023)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesJohn Gower’s "Confessio Amantis" ("The Lover’s Confession") is one of the most important English works of the fourteenth century. Within its frame of the lovesick lover’s confession are well over a hundred stories, mainly derived from classical mythology, the Bible, and history which exemplify the Middle Ages. Echoing the octosyllabic line of the original, The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Medieval Institute Press, 2023) is the first translation of the e...
Jane Ohlmeyer, "Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEmpire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer re-examines empire as process—and Ireland's role in it—through the lens of early modernity. It covers the two hundred years, between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth ce...
Aniefiok Ekpoudom, "Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain" (Faber and Faber, 2024)
January 19, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesWhy is music important to place, and place important to music? In Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain (Faber and Faber, 2024), Aniefiok Ekpoudom, a freelance writer and storyteller from South London, tells the story of UK Rap and Grime music. In doing so he tells the story of Modern British culture. The book uses three places- South London, South Wales, and the Midlands, and three case studies of some of UK Rap and Grime’s leading artists. In doing so, the book powerfully...
Yitzhak Teutsch, "The Cyprus Detention Camps: The Essential Research Guide" (Cambridge Scholars, 2019)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBeginning in August 1946, stateless and visaless Jews, most of them survivors of the Nazi death camps, who sought to immigrate to the Land of Israel were intercepted by the Royal Navy and deported to the nearby island of Cyprus, where they were detained in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Despite occupying a dramatic and fateful position in modern history, this saga has remained largely inaccessible due to the widespread dispersal of the primary sources and the linguistic difficulties present...
The Future of Ireland: Kevin Meagher on Why a United Ireland is Inevitable
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesIn A United Ireland: Why Unification in Inevitable and How It Will Come About (Biteback Publishing, 2017), Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about the most basic questions regarding Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue, and questions that have remained unasked, and perhaps unthought, must now be answered. Indeed, in the light of Brexit and a highly probable second independence referendum in Scotland, the reunification of Ireland is not...
Emma Gleadhill, "Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750-1830" (Manchester UP, 2022)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science. Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richards...
Christopher Corker, "The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930" (U of York, 2016)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 42 minutesChristopher Corker's The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930 (U of York, 2016) focuses on four in-depth case studies of John Brown, Cammell-Laird, Thomas Firth and Hadfields to examine the business and technology of the industry. It builds on the work of Tweedale and Trebilcock on Sheffield and armaments, and advances the argument that during the period of study from 1900 to 1930, the city was one of the most important centres for armaments research and prod...
Miles P. Grier, "Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn his new book Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (University of Virginia Press, 2023), Miles P. Grier argues that blackness in Othello and the texts that it influenced should be understood as deeply material, transferable, and unstable. The defining of alphanumerical and dramatic characters, while represented as settled, was anything but. As Miles writes in the book, “Before the racial categories of high scientific racism were elaborated in the late eighteen...
Rishad Choudhury, "Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes ...
Elisabeth Gernerd, "The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFrom rumps and stays to muffs and handkerchiefs, underwear and accessories were critical components of the 18th-century woman's wardrobe. They not only created her shape, but expressed her character, sociability, fashionability, and even political allegiances. These so-called ephemeral flights of fashion were not peripheral and supplementary, but highly charged artefacts, acting as cultural currency in contemporary society. The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the Late 18th-C...
Michael Quinn Dudley, "The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy" (Cambridge Scholars, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesFor nearly 200 years, people have questioned the identity of Shakespeare; however, this debate is often dismissed by most scholars as “just a conspiracy theory,” with the life of the poet-playwright being “beyond doubt.” And yet, the documented facts related to the man from Stratford are meagre—where they exist at all—forcing biographers to rely heavily on their own imaginations. The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy: Knowledge, Rhetoric, Identity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,...
Stéphane Jettot, "Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesOften cited but rarely studied in their own right, family directories allow a reconsideration of how ancestry and genealogy became an object of widespread commercialization across the eighteenth century. These directories replaced the expensive, locally-produced, early modern artefacts (tombs, windowpanes, illuminated pedigrees), and began to reach a wide audience of readers in the British Isles and the colonies. In Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in...
Matthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the workings of the British Russia Company and the commercial entanglements of the British and Russian empires in the long eighteenth century. This innovative and highly readable monograph challenges the long-held views of Russian economic backwardness in the early modern period and stresses the importance of personal histories and individual agency ...
Patrick R. O'Malley, "The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesPatrick R. O'Malley's book The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (U Virginia Press, 2023) analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, Patrick O’Malley interrogates the bardic verse epic, the gothic tale, the realist novel, the stage melodrama, and the political po...
Matthew Kennedy, "On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide" (Oxford UP, 2024)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the oceans of ink devoted to the monumental movie star/businesswoman/political activist Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (1932-2011), her beauty and not-so-private life frequently overshadowed her movies. While she knew how to generate publicity like no other, her personal life is set aside in this volume in favor of her professional oeuvre and unique screen dynamism. In On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide (Oxford UP, 2024), her marriages, illnesses, media firestorms, perfume empire, violet...
Brandon Presser, "The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania and Mutiny in the South Pacific" (Icon Books, 2022)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesIn 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era: the whereabouts of a band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions. Seven generations later, the island is still inhabited by descendants of the original mutineers, marooned like modern castaways. In 2018, Brandon Presser went to live among its families; two clans bound by ci...
Eileen Botting, "The Wollstonecraftian Mind" (Routledge, 2019)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and co-editor with Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee of the anthology The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). The collection presents thirty-nine essays from distinguished scholars in philosophy, religion, literature, intellectual history, and other fields who consider the work of the eighteenth-century British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. A political and moral thinker and a forerunner to modern feminism she has not r...
Virginia Chieffo Raguin, "The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesThe Illuminated Window: Stories Across Times (Reaktion, 2023) is a unique journey through stained-glass installations that spans both time and place. Diverse in technique and style, these windows speak for the communities that created them. From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, we find in the windows stories of conflict, commemoration, devotion and celebration. Dr. Virginia Chieffo Raguin is our guide through the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury and Cologne, and takes us from Paris’...