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
L. M. Ratnapalan, "Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesHow does Robert Louis Stevenson’s engagement with Pacific Islands cultures demonstrate processes of inculturation and the transformation of global Christianity? L. M. Ratnapalan's book Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh UP, 2023) re-orients the intellectual biography of Robert Louis Stevenson by presenting him in the distinctive cultural environment of the Pacific. The book argues that Stevenson was religiously literate within a Scott...
Teresa Michals, "Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson's Navy" (U Virginia Press, 2021)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 21 minutesThe well-known Admiral Horatio Nelson fought all of his most historically significant battles after he lost his right arm and the sight in one eye. With this notable exception, however, disabled members of the military on active duty remain largely invisible. Teresa Michals' book Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson's Navy (U Virginia Press, 2021) reveals that at least twenty-four other Royal Navy officers reached the rank of Commander or higher through continued...
Jonathan Sandler, "The English GI: World War II Graphic Memoir of a Yorkshire Schoolboy's Adventures in the United States and Europe" (2022)
September 08, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesJonathan Sandler’s The English GI: World War II Graphic Memoir of a Yorkshire Schoolboy’s Adventures in the United States and Europe, is an adaptation of his grandfather’s 1994 war memoir. His grandfather, Bernard Sandler, was a British citizen of Latvian Jewish descent who served in the American Army. The book is illustrated by Brian Bicknell. The English GI sheds light into the experience of average people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Jonathan Sandler’s treatment of Bernard San...
Oliver Crisp and Daniel J. Hill, eds., "Reason in the Service of Faith: Collected Essays of Paul Helm" (Routledge, 2023)
September 08, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesPaul Helm is a distinguished philosopher, with particular interests in the philosophy of religion. His work covers some of the most important aspects of the field as it has developed in the last thirty years with particular contributions to metaphysics, religious epistemology, and philosophical theology. In celebration of Helm's life's work, Reason in the Service of Faith: Collected Essays of Paul Helm (Routledge, 2023), edited by Oliver Crisp and Daniel J. Hill, brings together a range of hi...
Steven Veerapen, "The Wisest Fool: The Life of James VI and I" (Birlinn, 2023)
September 07, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesJames VI and I has long endured a mixed reputation. To many, he is the homosexual King, the inveterate witch-roaster, the smelly sovereign who never washed, the colourless man behind the authorised Bible bearing his name, the drooling fool whose speech could barely be understood. For too long, he has paled in comparison to his more celebrated – and analysed – Tudor and Stuart forebears. But who was he really? To what extent have myth, anecdote, and rumour obscured him? In this new biography T...
Clive Moore, "Making Mala: Malaita in Solomon Islands, 1870s–1930s" (Australia National UP, 2017)
September 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMalaita is one of the major islands in the Solomons Archipelago and has the largest population in the Solomon Islands nation. Its people have an undeserved reputation for conservatism and aggression. Clive Moore's book Making Mala: Malaita in Solomon Islands, 1870s–1930s (Australia National UP, 2017) argues that in essence Malaitans are no different from other Solomon Islanders, and that their dominance, both in numbers and their place in the modern nation, can be explained through their rece...
Peter Foster, "What Went Wrong with Brexit? And What We Can Do about It" (Canongate, 2023)
September 07, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesIt’s been over three years since the UK withdrew from the EU and no one – not even the most ardent Brexiter – thinks it has gone well so far. Defending the cause after yet another summertime setback, the best Matthew Lesh from the Institute of Economic Affairs could offer was: “Brexit simply means that British representatives can make … choices, not that they must point in any particular direction”. Ever since the British voted to leave the EU in 2016, millions of words have been written for ...
Taylor Cowdery, "Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
September 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIs the raw material of literature the paper, ink, vellum, paphyrus, and increasingly electronic data that it is inscribed on? Or is the stuff of literature the storehouse of tropes, techniques, and plots that authors draw from? And what kind of labor is the process of transforming that matter into literature? Earlier this year, Taylor Cowdery published an academic study on just this subject. The title of Taylor’s book is Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chau...
James Newlin and James W. Stone, "New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains" (Routledge, 2023)
September 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDr. Richard Waugaman is an emeritus supervising and training analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. He is also a well-respected author. With regard to his career he has said, “I have practiced clinical psychoanalysis for over 40 years. Initially, my publications were mostly on psychoanalysis.” In 2002, he made a discovery when he learned that the traditional theory about who wrote Shakespeare is faith-based, not evidence-based. As he plunged deeply into primary researc...
Andrew Hesketh, "Escape to Gwrych Castle: A Jewish Refugee Story" (U of Wales Press, 2023)
September 04, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesIn 1939, a number of German Jewish refugee children, brought over on the Kindertransport, found themselves in Abergele, North Wales. Their temporary new home? Gwrych Castle, where a Hachshara was being set up: a residential 'training centre' aimed at preparing the Jewish children for life on a kibbutz in Israel, where they hoped to be reunited with their families. In Escape to Gwrych Castle: A Jewish Refugee Story (U of Wales Press, 2023), Andrew Hesketh explores the lesser-told history of th...
Kimberly Mair, "The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
September 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDuring the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defence by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals, and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to those daily routines in homes and neighbourhoods. In The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain (Bloomsbury, 202...
The Future of the NHS: A Discussion with Gavin Francis
September 03, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesThe British National Health Service - free for all - used to be the envy of the world. But today the NHS is malfunctioning. More and more people are resorting to private care – is not unusual now for Brits to travel to Turkey or Lithuania to get hip replacements and the like – so should Britain now give up on the NHS and move to a European model of healthcare… Dr Gavin Francis has just written a book on the NHS: Free For All: Why the NHS is Worth Saving (Profile Books, 2024). Listen to him in...
Peter K. Andersson, "Fool: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man" (Princeton UP, 2023)
September 02, 2023 08:00 - 24 minutesThe first biography of Henry VIII’s court fool William Somer, a legendary entertainer and one of the most intriguing figures of the Tudor age In some portraits of Henry VIII there appears another, striking figure—a gaunt and morose-looking man with a shaved head and, in one case, a monkey on his shoulder. This is William or "Will" Somer, the king’s fool, a celebrated wit who reportedly could raise Henry’s spirits and spent many hours with him, often alone. Was Somer an “artificial fool,” a cu...
Aaron Kunin, "Character as Form" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
September 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s guest is Aaron Kunin, Professor of English at Pomona College. We will discuss two books Aaron published in 2019: the first is Character as Form (Bloomsbury), a re-examination of the early modern understanding of “character” as stereotype, generalization, and convention. In Character as Form, Aaron braids together close readings of furniture in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a reflection on the concept of negative anthropology from Raul Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death, and in...
Una McIlvenna, "Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 31, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesAcross Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (Oxford UP, 2022) looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium coul...
Jeremy Black, "Why the Industrial Revolution Happened in Britain" (Amberley Publishing, 2023)
August 26, 2023 08:00 - 25 minutesToday I talked to Jeremy Black about his new book Why the Industrial Revolution Happened in Britain (Amberley Publishing, 2023). Britain's key importance in world history was a product of its constitution and its empire, but both, in turn, were sustained and supported by Britain's role in achieving the first Industrial Revolution. In part this was a matter of coal and steam but far more was involved. Alongside the 'push' factors of entrepreneurs and resources came the 'pull' factors of consum...
Lawrence Goldman, "Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural sc...
Samrat Choudhury, "Northeast India: A Political History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
August 24, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesFor much of the past three months, the northeastern Indian state of Manipur—nestled right up against the border with Myanmar—has been the site of a conflict between two groups: the majority Meiteis and the minority Kukis. The fighting–with scenes of brutal violence, looting of police stations, and burnt places of worship–even sparked a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The region of northeast India has long posed a challenge for its leaders, both local and national...
Stephanie Barczewski, "How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023)
August 23, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesHow the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Barczewski is an exploration of the evolution of the quintessentially English country house. Country houses have come to be regarded as quintessentially English, not only in terms of their architectural style but because they appear to embody national values of continuity and insularity. The histories of country houses and England, however, have featured episodes of violence and disruption, so how did country houses come t...
Thomas Simpson, "The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
August 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2021), Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike. The Frontier in Briti...
Peter Moore, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream (1740–1776)" ( FSG, 2023)
August 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The pre...
Tanya Evans, "Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
August 20, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesFamily history is one of the most widely practiced forms of public history around the globe, especially in settler migrant nations like Australia and Canada. It empowers millions of researchers, linking the past to the present in powerful ways, transforming individuals' understandings of themselves and the world. Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Tanya Evans examines the practice, meanings and impact of undertaking family ...
Laura R. Kremmel, "Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies" (U Wales Press, 2022)
August 20, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesRomantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (U Wales Press, 2022) demonstrates a little-studied crossover between the Gothic imagination and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. Unafraid to explore the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, Laura R. Kremmel argues, Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama, and chapbooks expanded the possibilities of medical theories by showing what they might look like in a speculative space without limits. I...
Conor Lucey, "House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life" (Four Courts Press, 2022)
August 19, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesConor Lucey's book House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life (Four Courts Press, 2022) explores the everyday character and functions of domestic spaces in Georgian Ireland. While the design and decoration of the country pile and the aristocratic town house enjoys a long and distinguished literature, to date there has been no sustained examination of how rooms were habitually occupied and experienced, or how different social demographics--not least the burgeoning...
Diane Purkiss, "English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables (William Collins, 2022)
August 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA rich and indulgent history, English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables (William Collins, 2022) by Dr. Diane Purkiss will change the way you view your food and understand your past. Dr. Purkiss uses the story of food as a revelatory device to chart changing views on class, gender, and tradition through the ages. Sprinkled throughout with glorious details of historical quirks – trial by ordeal of bread, a fondness for ‘small beer’ and a war-time ice-cream su...
Nicholas Hoover Wilson, "Modernity's Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India" (Columbia UP, 2023)
August 17, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesWhen Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse. Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles;...
Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell, "Johnson at 10: The Inside Story" (Atlantic Books, 2023)
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesAfter his dramatic rise to power in the summer of 2019 amid the Brexit deadlock, Boris Johnson presided over the most turbulent period of British history in living memory. Beginning with the controversial prorogation of Parliament in August and the historic landslide election victory later that year, Johnson was barely through the door of No. 10 when Britain was engulfed by a series of crises that will define its place in the world for decades to come. From the agonising upheaval of Brexit an...
Al Coppola, "The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2016)
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesThe first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2016) explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public sp...
Jeremy Black, "Smollett's Britain" (St. Augustine's Press, 2022)
August 14, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutesIn Smollett's Britain (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), acclaimed British historian Jeremy Black examines the layers of craft and insight in Tobias Smollett, and discusses the particular nature of his genius and influence on British culture. Once again, Black acquaints the reader with the full range of a prolific writer's works and offers a backstage tour of the meaning and context of Britain's most beloved stories and story-tellers. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Histor...
Simon Mills, "A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760" (Oxford UP, 2020)
August 13, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesSimon Mills' book A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760 (Oxford UP, 2020) tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Mills investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and Englis...
Vaudine England, "Fortune's Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong" (Scribner, 2023)
August 10, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesThe legacy of the businessmen who built Hong Kong are all over the city. Bankers work in Chater House—named after Paul Chater, the Armenian businessman behind much of the city’s land reclamation (among many other things). The Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel sits along Mody Road, named after Hormusjee Naorojee Mody, a Parsi immigrant who helped found the University of Hong Kong. And that’s not including figures like Robert Hotung, the half-British, half-Chinese magnate who found more power in his Chi...
Phillip Reid, "A Boston Schooner in the Royal Navy, 1768-1772: Commerce and Conflict in Maritime British America" (Boydell Press, 2023)
August 10, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesThe small Boston-built schooner Sultana served as a customs-enforcement interceptor on the North American eastern seaboard in the period leading up to the American Declaration of Independence, when British taxation of American trade was a hugely contentious issue. As a typical workaday British American merchant ship taken into naval service, Sultana offers a rare opportunity to understand a technology of paramount importance to this world, where records for merchant ships are scarce, but wher...
Michael Roper, "Afterlives of War: A Descendants' History" (Manchester UP, 2023)
August 09, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesAfterlives of War: A Descendants' History (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Michael Roper documents the lives and historical pursuits of the generations who grew up in Australia, Britain and Germany after the First World War. Although they were not direct witnesses to the conflict, they experienced its effects from their earliest years. Based on ninety oral history interviews and observation during the First World War Centenary, this pioneering study reveals the contribution of desce...
Daniel Foliard, "The Violence of Colonial Photography" (Manchester UP, 2022)
August 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the first mass-produced cameras became available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and project an image of supremacy across the world. Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and gov...
Philip Roscoe, "How to Build a Stock Exchange: The Past, Present and Future of Finance" (Bristol UP, 2023)
August 07, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesWhy does the financial sector matter? In How to Build a Stock Exchange: The Past, Present and Future of Finance (Bristol UP, 2023), Philip Roscoe, a Professor of Management at the University of St Andrews, explores the history of the London Stock Exchange as part of a broader examination of the role of finance in the modern world. Richly detailed, including personal reflections as well as interviews and historical analysis, the book covers the technologies, personalities, and key events that ...
Sharon Thompson, "Quiet Revolutionaries: The Married Women's Association and Family Law" (Hart Publishing, 2022)
August 06, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesThis book tells the untold story of the Married Women's Association. Unlike more conventional histories of family law, which focus on legal actors, it highlights the little-known yet indispensable work of a dedicated group of life-long activists. Formed in 1938, the Married Women's Association took reform of family property law as its chief focus. The name is deceptively innocuous, suggesting tea parties and charity fundraisers, but in fact the MWA was often involved in dramatic confrontation...
Andy Cowan, "B-Side: Pop History Via Its Greatest B-Sides, 1917-2017" (Headpress, 2023)
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesIn his new book B-Sides: Pop History Via Its Greatest B-Sides, 1917-2017 (Headpress, 2023), Andy Cowan explores a century of music b-sides. Pop music would be a different beast without the B-Side. Music history is riven with songs deemed throwaway that revolted against their lowly status and refused to be denied. Be it rock'n'roll's national anthem ('Rock Around The Clock'), disco's enduring game-changer ('I Feel Love') or hip-hop's most notorious dis track ('Hit 'Em Up'), all three started l...
Share and Share Alike: Researching Sibling Relationships in Eighteenth-Century England
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat defines the complicated relationship between brothers and sisters—is it lineage? Love? Obligation? Friendship? Need? And why did so many parents expect their offspring to share and share alike? Historian Amy Harris joins us to talk about: What led to her interest in researching sibling relationships. Why her book project seemed to find her in an archive in England. How the early stresses on sibling relationships plagued them in later life. Why parents’ behavior affects how sibling re...
James B. Conroy, "The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesThe Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War (Simon and Schuster, 2023) is a character-driven account of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, an Anglo-American clash over military strategy that produced a winning plan when World War II could have gone either way. Churchill called it the most important Allied conclave of the war. Until now, it has never been explored in a full-length book. In a secret, no-holds-barred, ten-day debate in a Moroccan warzone, p...
D. J. Taylor, "Orwell: The New Life" (Pegasus Books, 2023)
August 01, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesA fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers. We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian. Usin...
Ben Highmore, "In Good Taste: How Britain's Middle Classes Found Their Style" (Manchester UP, 2023)
July 31, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesHow did the rise of consumerism impact Britain? In In Good Taste: How Britain's Middle Classes Found Their Style (Manchester UP, 2023), Ben Highmore, a Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, explores this question by telling the story of key British institutions and cultural habits. The book uses a wealth of different sources, including newspapers, lifestyle magazines, shopping catalogues, plays, books, and television programmes,...
Diya Gupta, "India in the Second World War: An Emotional History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
July 31, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesIn 1940s India, revolutionary and nationalistic feeling surged against colonial subjecthood and imperial war. Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War, while 3 million civilians were killed by the war-induced Bengal Famine, and Indian National Army soldiers fought against the British for Indian independence. This captivating new history shines a spotlight on emotions as a way of unearthing these troubled and contested experiences, exposing...
Finola O'Kane, "Landscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815" (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023)
July 30, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLandscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815 (Yale University Press, 2023) by Dr. Finola O’Kane explores how revolutionary ideas were translated into landscape design, encompassing liberty, equality, improvement and colonialism. Spanning the designed landscapes of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776 and the Irish rebellion of 1798, with some detours into revolutionary France, this book traces a comparative history of property s...
Tom Young, "Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813-1858" (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023)
July 29, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesUnmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813-1858 (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023) by Dr. Tom Young illuminates how new modes of artistic production in colonial India shaped the British state’s nationalisation of the East India Company, transforming the relationship between nation and empire. This pioneering book explores how art shaped the nationalisation of the East India Company between the loss of its primary monopoly in 1813 and its ultimate liqu...
Jonathan R. Topham, "Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
July 29, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesWhen Charles Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books of the day were the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight works was funded by a bequest of the last Earl of Bridgewater and written by leading men of science appointed by the president of the Royal Society to explore “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” Securing public attention beyond all expectations, the series offered Darwin’s generation ...
The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesIn April 2014, David Bromwich spoke at the Institute about his forthcoming book, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Harvard UP, 2014). Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University, and the author of studies of Hazlitt and Wordsworth. While Edmund Burke is commonly seen as the father of modern conservatism, Bromwich argues that he was a more subtle and interesting thinker. Burke defended the rights of disenfranchised minorit...
Lucy Moffat Kaufman, "A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2023)
July 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lucy Moffat Kaufman presents the lived experience of the Reformation in Tudor England. The Elizabethan settlement, and the Church of England that emerged from it, made way for a theological reformation, an institutional reformation, and a high political reformation. It was a reformation that changed history, birthed an Anglican communion, and would eventually launch ...
Po-Shek Fu, "Hong Kong Media and Asia's Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2023)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBritish Hong Kong was a historical anomaly in the Cold War. It experienced no "hot war" or organized movement for independence, and yet it was a key battlefield of Asia's cultural Cold War thanks largely to its unique location right next to Mao's China. The large influx of filmmakers, writers, and intellectuals from the mainland after 1948-1949 made the colony a hub of mass entertainment and popular publications in the region. Po-Shek Fu’s book Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War (Oxford Uni...
Kathleen Lubey, "What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century" (Stanford UP, 2022)
July 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourKathleen Lubey,'s book What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining s...
Rich Deakin, "Grebo!: The Loud & Lousy Story of Gaye Bykers on Acid and Crazyhead" (Headpress, 2021)
July 23, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesIn Grebo! The Loud & Lousy Story of Gaye Bikers on Acid and Crazyhead (Headpress, 2021) Rich Deakin explores West Midlands 1980s, home to heavy metal. Black Sabbath and Judas Priest are household names, but over the smoking chimneys and factory yards something new and equally ugly forms... 'Grebo' was a media constructed music genre that even today sends a shudder down the spines of discerning music fans and critics. A homegrown proto-grunge -- counterpart to the likes of Butthole Surfers, M...