New Books in British Studies
1,231 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Britain about their New Books
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Episodes
Nico Slate, "Lord Cornwallis is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India" (Harvard UP, 2019)
March 12, 2019 10:00 - 54 minutesIn the twenty-first century, India and the United States are two closely connected states. Some of this is economic, and with it comes a concern that jobs in the United States are being outsourced to India. The two countries also face concerns over terrorism, engage in cultural dialogue with each other, and lay claim to being two of the largest and most powerful democracies in the world. However, while many people might be aware of that status for the contemporary world, they are less aware o...
Whitney G. Gamble, "Christ and the Law: Antinomianism at the Westminster Assembly" (Reformation Heritage Books, 2018)
March 11, 2019 10:00 - 36 minutesThe Westminster Assembly (1643-53) was one of the most important ecclesiastical councils in the history of Reformed Protestantism, but until very recently it had received little in the way of scholarly attention. With the rediscovery of the minutes of the assembly, and their publication in 5 volumes by Oxford University Press, historians are now able to see inside its workings, and to understand how the doctrines of its famous confession of faith were established. Working on this exciting fro...
Christine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2018)
March 07, 2019 11:00 - 58 minutesThere can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused on pro-democracy protests, abducted booksellers or PRC Mainland integration plans, most of this news has revolved around a common theme - namely questions over Beijing's ruling Chinese Communist Party and its influence in Hong Kong. On this background, Christine Loh’s book Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong(Hong Kong Un...
Susan Carlile, "Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
March 06, 2019 11:00 - 1 hourThough not as well known today as some of her literary contemporaries, Charlotte Lennox wrote numerous works during the mid-18th century that won her critical acclaim and influenced subsequent generations of authors. In Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Susan Carlile draws upon Lennox’s published works, her surviving correspondence, and the studies of her era to reconstruct the life and times of this remarkable writer. Growing up in Britain’s Atlantic ...
Farhana Shaikh, "From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century" (Dahlia Publishing, 2019)
March 05, 2019 11:00 - 35 minutesWhat are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh, a writer, publisher, and journalist, details lessons from key arts thinkers. The book covers issues including funding, networking, audience development, the challenge of digital, and diversity in the arts. Crucially the book confronts the struggles and failures, as well as the successes, associated with developing an arts care...
Jacob Johanssen, "Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data" (Routledge, 2018)
February 28, 2019 11:00 - 37 minutesHow can insights from psychoanalysis help us understand digital culture? in Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (Routledge, 2018), Jacob Johanssen, a senior lecturer in the University of Westminster's School of Media and Communication, draws on the work of Freud and Anzieu to explore both traditional and new forms of media. The book uses research projects on the Embarrassing Bodies television show, and on digital labour, to show how psychoanalysis can inf...
Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
February 26, 2019 11:00 - 1 hourIn The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone i...
Matthew Bingham, "Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2019)
February 26, 2019 05:00 - 37 minutesMatthew Bingham, who teaches theology and church history at Oak Hill College, London, has written what must be one of the most startling accounts of religion in mid-seventeenth-century England. His new book, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019), argues against several centuries of historical interpretation of the new religious movement that emerged in London in the late 1630s and now numbers around 35 million adherents worldwide. Matt’s...
Jeremy Black, "Britain and Europe: A Short History" (Hurst, 2019)
February 13, 2019 11:00 - 37 minutesIt was a pleasure, earlier today, to speak to Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Britain and Europe: A Short History (Hurst, 2018). Jeremy is one of the best-known and certainly the most prolific of British historians, and his new book demonstrates both his extraordinary range and his compelling arguments. Beginning in the iron age and concluding in the present, Britain and Europe traces relationships between territories and cultures that chang...
Debra Thompson, "The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census" (Cambridge UP, 2016)
February 12, 2019 11:00 - 52 minutesDebra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics of the census. This book, which unpacks the census itself, leads the reader to consider how this mundane tool actually translates the abstraction of the state into a concrete entity, and, at the same time, how this tool has been and is used in contradictory ways in regard to the issue of race. Thomp...
Andrew R. Holmes, "The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830-1930" (Oxford UP, 2018)
February 04, 2019 11:00 - 37 minutesEarlier today I caught up with my colleague at Queen’s University Belfast, Andrew R. Holmes, to discuss his outstanding new book, The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830-1930 (Oxford UP, 2018). Andrew has been working on the history of Irish Presbyterianism for the last fifteen years or so, and along the way has produced some of the most exciting work on the history of evangelicalism in Britain and Ireland. His distinctive vantage...
Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, "The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged" (Policy Press, 2019)
January 31, 2019 13:01 - 39 minutesWho gets in to top professions? In The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged (Policy Press, 2019), Drs Sam Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at LSE, and Daniel Laurison, an assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explore the dominance of social elites in top professions. The book draws on theories of social mobility and the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explain how top professions are highly exclusive, with under representations of women, ethnic minorities, and ...
George R. Boyer, "The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain" (Princeton UP, 2019)
January 28, 2019 11:00 - 1 hourThe creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it only emerged after decades of different legislative responses to the problems of poverty that reflected shifting societal attitudes on the subject. As Boyer explains, welfare pol...
Philip Zelikow and Ernest May, "Suez Deconstructed: An Interactive Study in Crisis, War, and Peacemaking" (Brookings Institution, 2018)
January 25, 2019 12:15 - 1 hourExperiencing a major crisis from different viewpoints, step by step: the Suez crisis of 1956— one of the major crises of the 1950s offers a potential master class in statecraft and the politics of strategy. It was an explosive Middle East confrontation capped by a surprise move that reshaped the region for many years to come. It was a diplomatic confrontation between the world’s two major colonial powers (France & Britain) and a major third-world country (Egypt), as well as a conflict betwee...
Hidetaka Hirota, "Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2018)
January 23, 2019 11:00 - 34 minutesHidetaka Hirota is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to his current position, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and taught at the City University of New York-City College. Dr. Hirota’s book, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018) has received awards from the ...
Marcia Morgan, "Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race" (Edwin Mellen Press, 2018)
January 23, 2019 11:00 - 49 minutesWith prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race offers an in-depth and unique analysis of a population largely lost in these debates and discussions: black women. By centering their experiences, Morgan offers and intersectional and psychodynamic examination of the prison worker and the organizational nature of the prison. This book offers added insight into not only the prison system a...
Katie Beswick, "Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage" (Methuen Drama, 2018)
January 22, 2019 11:00 - 42 minutesHow has the council estate been represented on stage? In Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage (Methuen Drama, 2018), Dr. Katie Beswick, a lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter, explores this question using a mixture of dramatic and social theory, along with examples from a variety of theatre performances and forms. The book sets out the history of social housing and the council estate, along with a reading of the (mis)representations of the estat...
William Kelso, "Jamestown: The Truth Revealed" (U Virginia Press, 2017)
January 18, 2019 11:00 - 1 hourIn Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (University of Virginia Press, 2017; paperback, 2018), William Kelso, Emeritus Head Archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, takes us literally to the soil where the 1607 Jamestown colony began, unearthing footprints of a series of structures, beginning with the James Fort, to reveal fascinating evidence of the lives and deaths of the first settlers, of their endeavors and struggles, and new insight into their relationships with the Virginia Indians...
Christopher Gerrard, "Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar, 1650" (Oxbow Books, 2018)
January 11, 2019 12:00 - 1 hourIn November 2013, two mass burials were discovered unexpectedly on a construction site in the city of Durham in northeast England. Over the next two years, a complex jigsaw of evidence was pieced together by Christopher Gerrard, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Durham, and a team of archaeologists to establish the identity of the human remains. Today we know them to be some of the Scottish prisoners who died in the autumn of 1650 in Durham cathedral and castle following the battl...
Onur Ulas Ince, "Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism" (Oxford UP, 2018)
January 10, 2019 11:00 - 1 hourOnur Ulas Ince constructs an important analysis of liberalism, capitalism, and empire in his new book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). This text brings together a number of lenses through which to consider the writings and ideas of British liberal thinkers, especially John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This book—which is part of a larger project that will contain another book paying attention to Adam Smith, David Hume, Je...
Jesse A. Zink, "Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism" (Baylor UP, 2018)
January 07, 2019 11:00 - 41 minutesThe most recent addition to Baylor University Press’s Studies in World Christianity is Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism (Baylor UP, 2018), by Jesse A. Zink, who is among many other things principal of Montreal Diocesan Theological College. Zink’s book is an outstanding account of the growth and evolution of Anglican Christianity among the Dinka people of what is now South Sudan. Zink traces the origins of the Anglican mission...
Suzanne Schneider, "Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2018)
December 31, 2018 11:00 - 51 minutesThe history of Palestine is overly political; most studies, especially of the Mandate period, when the British effectively colonized Palestine, focus on the political actors. In Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2018), Suzanne Schneider produces a social and cultural study that does not ignore the political actors, walking us through how religion was used by the British in educational settings in attempts to quell nationalis...
Victoria Brownlee, "Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625" (Oxford UP, 2018)
December 31, 2018 11:00 - 37 minutesVictoria Brownlee is the author of an exciting new contribution to discussions of early modern religion and literature. Her new book, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers an illuminating account of how, why, when, where and by whom Bibles were read in early modern England, as well as a series of case studies of particular characters or passages in the Old and New Testaments. Why did Bible reading matter so much in t...
Rory Cormac, "Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2018)
December 27, 2018 11:00 - 46 minutesIn the decades following the Second World War, the British government increasingly turned to covert operations as a means of achieving their foreign policy goals. In Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Rory Cormac describes the establishment of covert action as a tool of foreign policy and the various ways in which it was applied. As he explains, covert action was initially seen as a tool of warfare the use...
Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
December 19, 2018 11:00 - 43 minutesSuman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire. While scholars have often addressed this phenomenon through the lenses of academic anatomy and natural history, Seth suggests that medical care and theories of pathology were central to how Britons began to see their bodies as fundamentally distinct f...
K. Fullagar and M. A. McDonnell, "Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)
December 19, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourKate Fullagar's and Michael A. McDonnell's edited volume Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) reimagines the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the volatility that marked an era while playing a central role in the profound acceleration in encou...
Peter Hitchens, "The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion" (I.B. Tauris, 2018)
December 12, 2018 11:00 - 46 minutesWas World War II really the 'Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. In his newest book, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), writer and journalist, Peter Hitchens, past winner of the Orwell Prize and regular columnist for the Mail on Sunday, takes on the myth of World War II as the 'good war', and in the process he deconstructs the many ...
Andrew Roberts, "Churchill: Walking With Destiny" (Viking, 2018)
December 10, 2018 11:00 - 49 minutesFor all of the books written about Winston Churchill, much remains to be said about his extensive life and career. In Churchill: Walking With Destiny(Viking, 2018), Andrew Roberts takes advantage of newly available archival holdings – most notably the diaries of King George VI – to add to our understanding of this vitally important figure. Churchill’s life was never short of drama; born in Blenheim Palace, he spent his early years as a correspondent and a soldier in Britain’s imperial wars be...
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
December 06, 2018 13:04 - 1 hourMcKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the...
Diarmaid MacCulloch, "Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life" (Viking, 2018)
November 29, 2018 13:01 - 48 minutesDespite ranking among the most influential people in English history, Thomas Cromwell has long eluded biographers and historians. In Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (Viking, 2018), though, Diarmaid MacCulloch provides readers with the definitive study of this key figure in the English Reformation. Drawing upon the full range of the available archival material and his own deep understanding of the era, MacCulloch shows how Cromwell’s views and achievements often belie the historical repu...
Ruma Chopra, “Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone” (Yale UP, 2018)
November 21, 2018 11:00 - 39 minutesAfter being exiled from their native Jamaica in 1795, the Trelawney Town Maroons endured in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. In Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (Yale University Press, 2018), Ruma Chopra demonstrates how the unlikely survival of this community of escaped slaves reveals the contradictions of slavery and the complexities of the British antislavery era. Encompassing three distinct regions of the British Atlantic Worl...
Cairns Craig, “The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence” (Edinburgh UP, 2018)
November 08, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourProfessor Cairns Craig’s new book, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), which has been shortlisted for the Saltire History Book of the Year Award, is a wide-ranging study of the ways in which Scottish culture was defined, exported, transformed, and smuggled through its assimilation in the British State and the British Empire, their rise, their fall, and the more recent fallout. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), and the Chica...
Miranda Kaufmann, “Black Tudors: The Untold Story” (Oneworld, 2017)
November 02, 2018 10:00 - 35 minutesA black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptized in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From the archival records emerge the remarkable stories of ten Africans who lived free in Tudor England. They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors...
Donald H. Akenson, “Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism” (Oxford UP/McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018)
November 01, 2018 10:00 - 35 minutesDon Akenson, who is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, Ontario, is one of the most eminent scholars of Irish history. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2018; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) is the second of a projected three-book series of monographs that will explain how a new set of ideas about the church and the end of the world were developed among the...
Robert G. Ingram, “Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England” (Manchester UP, 2018)
October 24, 2018 10:00 - 42 minutesRobert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subjects in eighteenth-century England didn’t know they were living in something called ‘the Enlightenment.’ Rather, they were still grappling with the fallout of the Reformation, and more specifically the results of two bloody seventeenth-century revolutions. Ingram’s excellent book analyzes the ways that...
Roland Philipps, “A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean” (W.W. Norton, 2018)
October 23, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourDonald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, yet the complete extent of this shy, intelligent, and secretive man’s betrayal of his country and his friends, family and colleagues, has never been explored—until now. Drawing on a wealth of previously classified files and unseen family papers, A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean (W.W. Norton, 2018) meticulously document...
Gill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018)
October 18, 2018 10:00 - 53 minutesThe Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and it even cropped up in the British media as recently...
Jeffrey Kahan, “Shakespeare and Superheroes” (ARC Humanities Press, 2018)
October 18, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourWhat do Shakespeare and superheroes have in common? A penchant for lycra and capes? A flair for the dramatic? Well, according to Shakespeare scholar, English Professor and comic-book fan Jeffrey Kahan, the connection between Batman and the Bard runs much deeper. In his new book, Shakespeare and Superheroes (ARC Humanities Press, 2018), Kahan argues that Shakespeare’s work and the popular superhero comics of the past century are actually engaged in a meaningful dialogue with each other. Rather...
Nathaniel Philbrick, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown” (Viking, 2018)
October 16, 2018 10:00 - 47 minutesMost Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates in his new book In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking, 2018), it was Admiral Comte de Grasse’s naval victories which made possible George Washington’s decisive victory at the battle of Yorktown. Such a victory did not seem possible at the start of 1781, as the British ...
Stephanie L. Derrick, “The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America” (Oxford UP, 2018)
October 11, 2018 10:00 - 36 minutesC. S. Lewis remains one of the most popular religious writers, and one of the most widely discussed children’s writers. I had the chance to catch up with Stephanie L. Derrick about her new book, The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America (Oxford University Press, 2018), and to talk about the many personalities and the changing reputation of her subject. Paying attention to the material circumstances of publication, while thinking about the ways in which rep...
Charlotte Greenhalgh, “Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain” (U California Press, 2018)
October 09, 2018 10:00 - 45 minutesWhat role did elderly Britons have in shaping the twentieth-century welfare state? In her new book, Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain (University of California Press, 2018), Charlotte Greenhalgh offers a compelling portrait of a segment of Britain’s twentieth-century population that has, to date, received limited scholarly attention. Mobilizing a range of sources, from social science reports to women’s magazines, from photographs to autobiographies, Greenhalgh successfully foregrounds experi...
B. P. Owensby and R. J. Ross, “Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America” (NYU Press, 2018)
September 28, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourJustice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York University Press, 2018), edited by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross, examines the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous laws in the New World. As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against one another as settlers and indigenous people sought to negotiate their relationship. In order for...
Stephen R. Platt, “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age” (Knopf, 2018)
September 24, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourThe reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and continue dealing in the lucrative commodity, opium. Historian Stephen R. Platt’s book, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (Knopf, 2018) proves that the path to war was not so simple. Internal rebellions weakened the Qing military and stretched resources thin. British ...
Nick Hubble, “The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)
September 21, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourNick Hubble’s The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) is a thrilling, and timely challenge to the orthodoxy that proletarian and high-modernist literatures ought to be understood in opposition to one another. Featuring writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, D. H. Lawrence, John Sommerfield, H. G. Wells, and Walter Brierley, this study creates new critical space that reveals the modernism in the proletarian, and the proletarian in the...
William Anthony Hay, “Lord Liverpool: A Political Life” (Boydell Press, 2018)
September 20, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIf Lord Derby was the ‘forgotten Prime Minister’ and Andrew Bonar-Law was the ‘Unknown Prime Minister’ then Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770-1828), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who was Britain’s longest serving prime minister since William Pitt the Younger, surely deserves is own epithet. While not providing us with that, William Anthony Hay, Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University has instead provided us with the definitive modern study of Lord Liverpool’s political career–Lord ...
Sir John Elliott, “Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion” (Yale UP, 2018)
September 18, 2018 10:00 - 58 minutesSir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University, one of the premier historians writing in English on Spanish and European History in the Early Modern period, has now delighted his many ardent readers and admirers by writing a superb book dealing with the comparative histories of Scottish and Catalan nationalism. Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion (Yale University Press, 2018) is by turns both erudite and easily informative. Sir John’s book entrances the ...
Jeremy Martens, “Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907” (UWA Publishing, 2018)
September 14, 2018 10:00 - 16 minutesIn his new book, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (UWA Publishing, 2018), Jeremy Martens, a senior lecturer in History at the University of Western Australia, offers a comparative look at the tensions that arose in settler colonies like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as white settlers protested Asian migration but had only limited sovereignty vis-à-vis the Colonial Office in London. These competi...
Stephen Lee Naish, “Riffs & Meaning: Manic Street Preachers and Know Your Enemy” (Headpress, 2018)
September 11, 2018 10:00 - 6 minutesIn Riffs & Meaning: Manic Street Preachers and Know Your Enemy (Headpress, 2018), Stephen Lee Naish tells the story of Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers’ 2001 album Know Your Enemy. The record’s engagement with diverse and unexpected musical influences, as well as its mixed reception by critics and fans alike, inspired Naish to uncover the ways in which the album’s subversion of expectations ultimately benefitted the work, allowing for a reconsideration if its impact. Riffs & Meaning con...
Megan Ward, “Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character” (OSU Press, 2018)
September 07, 2018 10:00 - 34 minutesArtificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of lengthy novels, to the world of the written word. In spite of seeming incongruity the AI and Victorian literature evoke, the two notions do establish a contact zone: the mind. AI and characters created by Victorian writers are connected by the individual’s attempt and desire to project their imagin...
Charles Umney, “Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain” (Pluto Press, 2018)
September 03, 2018 10:00 - 43 minutesWhat is class? In Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain (Pluto Press, 2018), Charles Umney, an Associate Professor in Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leeds, offers a new marxist analysis of the meaning and impact of class. The book is written in dialogue with recent developments in class analysis, including theories that have placed culture at the heart of how class should be understood. Umney’s book returns to class as more than just classifica...