It takes a long term, long lens, view of Russian policies and actions internationally and domestically, fundamentally questioning the relationship and boundaries between active measures, espionage, cyberespionage, and hybrid warfare.

• The most up-to-date and systematic analysis of Russia’s hybrid warfare.
• Draws on a wide range of multi-disciplinary literature.
• Questions the boundaries between active measures, espionage, cyberespionage, and hybrid warfare.

Dr. Kristan Stoddart is an Associate Professor at Swansea University where he is director of the Geopolitical Challenges Research Institute. Previously he was a Reader in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. From 2014 to 2017, Kristan was part of a £1.2 million project examining Cyber Security Lifecycles funded by Airbus Group and the Welsh Government. He also was a member of the UK’s Independent Digital Ethics in Policing Panel for around four years through to 2018. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of eight books and many articles and book chapters.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

Masako Ichihara, Ph.D. (2021), Kyoto Univeristy, is Program-specific Assistant Professor at the Unit of the Environment and Law, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law and Policy, Kyoto University.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

The first three chapters examine the literary works attributed to Patañjali, explore legendary accounts and beliefs associated with this multifaceted figure, and survey temples and shrines dedicated to the sage. The following five chapters trace the development of Patañjali’s iconography from its earliest forms in Tamilnadu, South India, to contemporary examples.

These individuals were not plantation workers. They served as carpenters, sailors, soldiers, canoe workers, healers, cooks, mothers, and interpreters. They built forts, repaired boats, buried the dead, and maintained trading posts.

Dr Tuck’s research demonstrates that, despite harsh conditions, Castle Slaves formed families, preserved African names, practised healing, held funerals, and resisted captivity through escape and daily acts of survival.

Women played key roles as caregivers, cultural anchors, and healers, despite facing significant vulnerability and exploitation. The book also highlights the high number of escape attempts from James Island, challenging the idea that resistance in West Africa was uncommon.

Drawing on company ledgers, punishment logs, and death records, Dr. Tuck reconstructs a world often overlooked in Atlantic history. His work emphasises that each archival entry represents a person with relationships, memories, fears, and hopes.

The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River provides both a history of slavery and a testament to resilience, community, and humanity.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands and Europe.

The book argues that genuine liberation must include economic independence, epistemic freedom, cultural reclamation, and Pan-African unity. Dr Ouma highlights the importance of revitalising indigenous knowledge systems, strengthening regional cooperation, and addressing dependencies that limit Africa's ability to determine its own path.

We discussed topics ranging from the lasting mental effects of colonialism to the potential of the AfCFTA, the rise of youth activism, and the key role African women play in liberation movements. It was a thoughtful look at what decolonisation should mean today.

For those interested in African philosophy, global politics, or contemporary decolonial thought, this book and the accompanying interview offer valuable insights.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

Ciupa situates Venezuela within not only the broader ‘Pink Tide’ that swept different parts of Latin America since the1990s, but also within the dynamics and tendencies of oil extraction and class politics at a local and international scale. Much of the literature has seen Venezuela as trapped in the classic ‘resource curse’, where oil-exporting developing countries earn windfall revenues but have been unable to translate that to sustainable growth and development, which is usually deemed to be due to poor economic planning, weak institutions, and a lack of incentives for governments to invest. Ciupa’s book argues, instead, that the interplay between national and international structures and relations of power, in Venezuela and in the global market, serve to perpetuate oil dependence. In making this argument, Ciupa presents a detailed, historical analysis of the ways in which the country was subsumed into the global economy as an oil exporter, tracing Venezuela’s development and political economy through its prior dictatorships, the crises of the twentieth century, and then finally through the revolutionary Bolivarian government led by Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro. Kristin Ciupa’s new book is a detailed, theoretically invigorated, and careful examination of Venezuela and its oil industry, which is still at the centre of geopolitical struggles more broadly today.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

Marco de Benito holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Civil Procedure at IE University. His research focuses on comparative civil procedure, international arbitration, private law, and legal history. He arbitrates and advises on international matters.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

David Frankfurter holds the William Goodwin Aurelio Chair of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University. He joined the faculty of B.U. in the fall of 2010. A scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions with specialties in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, magical texts, popular religion, and Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods, Frankfurter’s particular interests revolve around theoretical issues like the place of magic in religion, the relationship of religion and violence, the nature of Christianization, and the representation of evil in culture. 

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

In The Making of Global FIFA, Burlamaqui argues that while Havelange was the FIFA president that signed the first deal with Coca Cola, his election was not a radical departure from “pure” football into commercialization. Far from a tale of British stiffness and Brazilian flexibility, Burlamaqui shows a longer and interconnected history of FIFA’s global expansion. Former FIFA president Stanley Rous was less conservative than critics alleged. Havelange was more conservative than many assumed, happy to work with entrenched forces across the political and sporting worlds.

Burlamaqui conducted extensive archival research in Brazil, the UK, and at FIFA and the IOC in Switzerland. His compelling argument demonstrates the contingency of Havelange’s rise. His success was tied intimately to the domestic politics of the military regime and diplomatic efforts of Brazil in the 1970s. He was also the beneficiary of global forces: the Cold War, decolonization, and the growing resistance to racial oppression. Unlike many other sports scholars, Burlamaqui also argues that what happened on the field mattered: Havelange relied on the field prowess of the seleção.

The book proceeds chronologically. The first chapter shines a new light on FIFA President Stanley Rous. Rous steered FIFA from the middle – between the conservatism of Swiss Ernst Thommen and the radicalism of the Yugoslavian Mihailo Andrejevic. Burlamaqui thus characterizes Rous’ tenure as setting the stage for Havelange’s globalization.

Chapters 2 and 3 offer biographical examinations of Havelange and situate his personal history into the broader story of Brazil and the globe. His rise in Brazil’s sportocracy was not simple: he served on both the Brazilian Olympic Committee and the Brazilian Sports Confederation. In the latter, he was heavily criticized for Brazil’s failure at the 1966 World Cup. Yet Havelange benefitted from the interplay between the Brazilian business and military communities during the military regime (1964-1985). In preparation for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, Havelange developed a “Mexico Plan” and gambled his success on a seleção victory. When the national team delivered and raised the Jules Rimet for the third time, Havelange cemented his position.

Chapter 4 is the crux of the book, where Burlamaqui shows how decolonization, ideas about development, and the myth of Brazilian racial equality intersected to make the Brazilain sportocrat a strong candidate for FIFA’s 1974 Presidential election. Havelange campaigned with the support of his allies at home and abroad. He sold a particular vision of Brazil: a model of developed decolonization that was charting a third path between the United States and the Soviet Union. He appealed especially to FIFA officials from the “Third World”, sending emissaries to Africa and Asia, and even allegedly helping to pay off some of their FIFA dues to win their votes.

In chapter 5, Burlamaqui explains who voted for Havelange. Havelange mobilized support from new FIFA countries, benefiting from the rise of China, the support of the communist bloc, and the disunity of Europe.

Burlamaqui’s deeply researched and convincing account opens new avenues for research into sports bureaucrats. The Making of Global FIFA: Cold War Politics and the Rise of João Havelange to the FIFA Presidency, 1950-1974 will be of interest to scholars interested in global football, FIFA, and sports diplomacy.

In The Digital Medieval Manuscript: Material Approaches to Digital Codicology (Brill, 2025), Suzette van Haaren explores the digital medieval manuscript as a unique cultural artifact, not just a copy of its physical counterpart. Through three case studies, van Haaren reveals how digital manuscripts function in libraries, museums, and scholarship today. Blending manuscript studies with digital humanities, this book offers a fresh materialist approach to the discourse surrounding the digitisation of cultural heritage and provides a nuanced view of how it shapes the way we perceive, handle, and preserve medieval manuscripts in an increasingly digital world.

This episode makes reference to other scholars in the field of digital codicology, several of whom have spoken about this work on New Books Network. Listen to Bridget Whearty speak about Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor; Michelle R. Warren speak about Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet; and Astrid J. Smith speak about Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age. Van Haaren also mentions the work of composer Mark Dyer, specifically the Scribe project.

Digitised manuscripts discussed in this interview include the Bury Bible, Der naturen bloeme, and the prayer book of Mary of Guelders. Images from Der naturen bloeme are also available on Wikimedia Commons.

Suzette van Haaren is a postdoc in the CRC Virtuelle Lebenswelten at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research reflects on the impact of the increasing digitisation (and virtualisation) of historical heritage. She is interested in the Middle Ages in contemporary media contexts.

Gian Piero Persiani is Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Jingyi Li is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Japan. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Daniel K. Falk is Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Chaiken Family Chair in Jewish Studies at Penn State University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

The book emphasises the importance of mobility and development in society, and how this was facilitated by the efforts of the German refugees in Britain. Among such efforts was the development of a corrosion-resistant substance by Shell. The book also highlights wartime challenges faced by refugees during the Second World War, including bombing and shortages. The book emphasises that the refugees’ experiences are same as the challenges of the British population, such as rationing and material shortages. The book reflects on how many refugees diversified their businesses to contribute to the British war effort, such as producing parachute silk. As part of the war experiences of the refugees, the book also accounts for the alien internment of refugees in Britain.

Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts and a podcast host on NBN. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ (22) Olugbodi Mariam | LinkedIn, Mariam Olugbodi (0000-0001-5027-6644) - ORCID and User:Margob28 - Meta

Judith M. Lieu is the author of Explorations in the Second Century: Texts, Groups, Ideas, Voices (Brill, 2025). She was Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge from 2007-2018. She studied at Durham and Birmingham Universities and previously taught at The Queen's College, Birmingham, King's College London (where she was Professor of New Testament Studies, 1999-2006), and Macquarie University, Sydney. From January 2020–June 2021 she was Frothingham Visiting Professor in New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. She is on the editorial board of a number of journals and series and was previously Editor of New Testament Studies. She is a Fellow of the British Academy (2014) and International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019).

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

The group positions the extraordinary Jewish and non-Jewish human struggle in facing dehumanization and extermination as the essence of the Shoah, challenging us with a profound ethical call.

The group positions the extraordinary Jewish and non-Jewish human struggle in facing dehumanization and extermination as the essence of the Shoah, challenging us with a profound ethical call.

Guest: Jakub Gortat (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lodz.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

Massimo Modonesi is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences Faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being ​Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject.​ He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci Society.

Maria Vignau served as a research assistant under Modonesi, and now teaches while working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Robert L. Worden, Ph.D. (1972) Georgetown University, retired in 2007 after 34 years at the Library of Congress where he authored more than 100 Asia-related studies for government agencies, and numerous China-related books, articles, and book reviews of personal interest. 

Jane Leung Larson is an independent scholar whose broad-based research on the Chinese Empire Reform Association evolved from studying the papers of her grandfather Tom Leung, Kang Youwei’s student in Guangzhou and host, travel companion, and confidant in North America. 

Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

Relevant Links

• Open Access of A Chinese Reformer in Exile here
• Sweet Bamboo: A Memoir of a Chinese American Family by Louise Leung Larson here
• NBN interview for Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898-1918: here

Guest: Anthony Knowles (he/him) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Sociology and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

Between the two world wars, they had to prove that they were free white persons to ensure their naturalization in the United States, while in Nazi Germany they needed to document that they were stakeholders of the Aryan race to safeguard their existence.

Vartan Matiossian's book is the first comprehensive account of a mostly untold story of dehumanization and racism in Europe and America that enhanced the racial and moral profiling of Armenians as undesirables. The Color of Choice: The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945) (Brill, 2025) frames this development within the context of the debates on whiteness and immigration in the United States culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924 and the xenophobic discourse in Germany before and during Nazism likening Armenians to Jews.

Find out as we speak with Cooper Smith about his recent monograph, Allusive and Elusive: Allusion and the Elihu Speeches of Job 32-37. Smith helpfully approaches the speeches of Elihu by discerning their allusions to previous sections in the Book of Job.

Cooper Smith received his PhD in 2019 at Wheaton College, and is Adjunct Instructor at Trinity Christian College (Palos Heights, IL) and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, IL).

The legacy of these efforts stretched far beyond the seventeenth century, too. Some texts continued to shape religious practice in Taiwan after the Dutch were expelled in 1662, while others circulated in Europe, informing how outsiders imagined the island. By tracing these journeys, Joby shows how Taiwan’s early missions were not just local episodes but part of a much larger global history of translation, improvisation, and exchange. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of early modern Taiwan, the history of Christian missions, and the global circulation of texts and ideas.

And if you are interested in learning more about his work, you can listen to Joby's earlier appearance on the New Books Network to talk about an earlier book, The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900), here. 

Peter Arzt-Grabner is Associate Professor and head of the Papyrological Research Unit at the Department of Biblical Studies and Ecclesiastical History at the University of Salzburg. He is the author of Philemon (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003) and 2. Korintherbrief (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013) as well as the co-author of More Light from the Ancient Near East: Understanding the New Testament through Papyri (Brill, 2023; with John S. Kloppenborg and Christina M. Kreinecker). He is also a series editor for Papyri and the New Testament (Brill) and Papyrologische Kommentare zum Neuen Testament (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity?

And what does the creation of camps and the segregation of people in them mean for society as a whole?

Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History (Brill, 2022) is an ambitious book surveys the systems of detention camps set up in Asia from the beginning of the 20th century in The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Timor, Korea and China.

Published in hardback by Brill, with a Haymarket paperback scheduled later.

Alan M. Wald is the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professer Emeritus at University of Michigan. His numerous books include The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.

Tune in as we speak with Beth Stovell about her monograph, Mapping Metaphorical Discourse in the Fourth Gospel. Beth's study shows how John’s Gospel describes the just character of Jesus’ kingship, the subversion of power implicit in his crucified form of kingship, and the necessity of response to Jesus as king and his reign.

Beth Stovell is Professor of Old Testament at Ambrose University, and is working on commentaries on Ezekiel, the Minor Prophets, Hosea, and the Gospel of John.

Join us as we speak with Gabriella Gelardini about the Book of Hebrews!

Gabriella Gelardini is Professor of Christian Religion, Worldview and Ethics at Nord University in Norway.

Volha Bartash is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster in Germany and a co-convenor of the network “Margins of Memory: Cultures and Politics of Non-Hegemonic Remembrance.” 

Tomasz Kamusella is Reader in Modern Central and Eastern European History at the University of St Andrews, whose work focuses on language politics and nationalism.

Host: Tatiana Klepikova is a Freigeist Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation and leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism at the University of Regensburg.

Contributors are: Hans-Joachim Bieber, Fukuoka Mariko, Hakoishi Hiroshi, Iwasa Takurō, Katō Yōko, Kawakita Atsuko, Gerhard Krebs, Kudō Akira, Heinrich Menkhaus, Danny Orbach, Peter Pantzer, Sven Saaler, Satō Takumi, Volker Stanzel, Suzuki Naoko, Tajima Nobuo, Tano Daisuke, and Rolf-Harald Wippich.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

In Negotiating Homosexuality in Islam: A Legal-hermeneutical Examination of Modern Shīʿī Discourse (Brill, 2024), Mehrdad Alipour engages these urgent questions with intellectual rigor and legal precision. Alipour is a scholar of Iranian and Islamic studies whose work focuses on Islamic legal theory, Shi‘i thought, and the evolving discourse around sex, gender, and sexuality in both premodern and modern contexts. He earned his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter and received traditional training at the Seminary of Qom in Iran. He is currently based at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, where he leads the project Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Islamic Legal Tradition, exploring how intersex identities have been understood in Shi‘i legal texts from the 14th to early 20th centuries. Another publication of his, “Navigating Body Politics in Shiʿi Legal Tradition: Examining Sayyid Kāẓim al-Yazdī’s Account of Non-Binary Intersex,” is available online for free to all readers.

Rather than offering a theological verdict or issuing new rulings in the book, Alipour turns to the internal tools of the Imāmī Shīʿī legal tradition—most notably, the method of ijtihād—to explore how scholars have historically interpreted and might yet reinterpret questions regarding sexual relations. Through a careful and brilliant analysis of Qur’anic verses, hadith traditions, legal principles, and rational argument, Alipour shows how the Shīʿī legal tradition contains interpretive possibilities that could speak to contemporary understandings of homosexuality as a consensual, identity-based, and egalitarian practice.

As Alipour clarifies in our conversation, his study does not attempt to declare what Islamic law must say about same-sex relations, but rather to identify and expand the discursive spaces within which such a conversation can meaningfully take place. By using the very legal principles and interpretive strategies that have shaped Shīʿī jurisprudence across generations, he invites scholars and jurists to consider how Islamic legal thought might respond, faithfully and creatively, to modern realities. The book is a thoughtful and necessary contribution to ongoing debates on Islam, law, and sexual diversity.

In our conversation today, Alipour walks us through the book’s key arguments and findings, highlights the significance of applying modern Imāmī ijtihādic principles to the question of same-sex relations, and outlines how core Islamic sources—the Qur’an, sunnah, reason (ʿaql), and consensus (ijmāʿ)—have been interpreted in relation to same-sex intimacy, with special attention to specific gaps in the story of Lot in the Qur’an. He also clarifies key premodern terms that are often cited by contemporary Muslim scholars as referring to homosexuality, unpacking their historical meanings and legal contexts.

This here is my conversation with Mehrdad Alipour on his book, Negotiating Homosexuality in Islam: A Legal-hermeneutical Examination of Modern Shīʿī Discourse (Brill, 2024).

Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is currently a heritage conservation intern.

Jonathan W. Bryant, Ph.D (2023), Loyola University Chicago, is Senior Editor of Bibles and Bible reference works at Tyndale House Publishers and is an ordained minister of The Wesleyan Church.

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

This is the fourth book in the series, Comparative Law in Global Perspective published by Brill Niehoff, and it is available open access here.

Giacinto della Cananea is a full professor in the department of law at the University of Bocconi. He holds a PhD in European law from the European University Institute (1994) and a law degree from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ (1989). He is a public lawyer, with research interests in administrative law, European Union law and global administrative law, with specific focus on three areas: the comparative law of administrative procedures, the general principles of law, and budgetary issues. He and Mauro Bussani are co-editors of the series Comparative Law in Global Perspective, published by Brill Niehoff

Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. She is an editor at the New Books Network

In Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy (Brill, 2024), Professor Ayalon debunks what he calls that myth. The Ottomans, according to Yaron, were interested in stability - economic and otherwise. Minorities, with their additional taxes, would bring more financial benefits. Many were merchants who would pay higher taxes. With this premise, we discussed the world of the Ottoman Jews as one of creating community and society. There were Romaniot, Sephardim, Msta'ribun and some Ashkenazim who settled across these lands, and together they created strong communities with Rabbinic and lay leadership and a cultural heritage that can still be seen today in those communities who have survived and relocated around the world. 

Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series by Brill and Haymarket.

Kyle Edwards is a Curriculum Administrator at the University of Minnesota, and a member of AFSCME 3800.

August Nimtz is a professor in the political science department at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of numerous books, including Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-Time Political Analysis and The Ballot, the Streets―or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution.

The BEEC aims both to provide a critical review of the methods used in Early Christian Studies and also to update the history of scholarship.

The BEEC addresses a range of traditions, including iconographic, martyrological, ecclesiastical, and Christological traditions, as well as cultic phenomena, such as the veneration of saints. The history of the transmission of texts and the reception of early Christian writers are also addressed. The BEEC focuses on early Christianity from a historical perspective in order to uncover the lasting legacy of the authors and texts until the present day.

David G. Hunter is the Margaret O'Brien Flatley Chair of Catholic Theology at Boston College.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Join us as we speak with David DeJong about "a prophet like Moses."

David DeJong (PhD, Notre Dame) is Assistant Professor of Religion at Hope College; his research and teaching focus on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and its interpretation in ancient Judaism and early Christianity.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020), and a recent 2 volume commentary on Numbers. He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

More about the book: In The Lord Who Listens, Charles C. Helmer IV draws on Holy Scripture and the theology of Karl Barth to offer a theological intepretation of God's hearing. Prioritizing this neglected biblical theme, Helmer develops a theological grammar for speaking of God's hearing that maintains a strong creator-creature distinction and then proceeds to demonstrate the profound implications God's hearing has for the doctrines of anthropology, Christology and, thus, for understandings of the gospel. In contrast to passibilist-liberationist strategies, God's hearing is argued to furnish existentially and theologically superior resources for those who cry out to be heard by God.

Steve J. Shone is Lecturer in Political Science at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He received his Ph.D. (1992) in political science from the University of California-Riverside. He has taught at Winona State University, Gonzaga University, and the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist(Lexington Books, 2010), American Anarchism (Brill, 2013), Women of Liberty (Brill, 2019), and Rose Summerfield: Australian Radical (Lexington Books, 2022).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

Evangelicals in interwar Romania were a vibrant mix of ethnicities, languages, and social statuses. Jews, Roma, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and Russians sang, prayed, and preached in their native languages. Romanian statesmen perceived them as a danger for the construction of a strong post-WWI national identity. The lived religion of interwar Romanian evangelicals and their struggle through music for legitimacy demonstrates the close ties between national self-understanding and religion. The diverse groups of Romanian evangelicals reveal how minorities in 20th century Europe challenged established religious concepts and constructed their new identities.

Jeannine Hanger has been involved in the Biola community since 2000. She earned a Master of Arts (2004) and Master of Theology (2009) at Talbot in New Testament Studies and has been teaching undergraduates in an adjunct role since 2009. She recently completed her doctoral studies (2021) at the University of Aberdeen, also in the New Testament. Her research interests revolve around the Gospels. More specifically she has enjoyed exploring literary approaches to texts seen alongside their ancient world contexts. Her thesis focused on participation with Christ in John’s Gospel, which led to an examination of sensory imagery, metaphor, and sense perception in ancient texts. These embodied approaches highlight concrete, tangible, and affective qualities of participation with Christ. This ties into her heart for students to know God through the Word with every aspect of their beings: heart, soul, mind, and strength. As the wife of a pastor, Jeannine has also been deeply invested in the local church.

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2023) situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic intellectual and religious histories. Central to this story are the Mughal siblings, Jahanara Begum and Dara Shikoh, and their Sufi guide Mulla Shah. Through detailed art historical analysis supported by new translations, this study contextualizes artworks made for Indo-Muslim patrons by putting them into direct dialogue with written testimonies.

Attempting to get answers to these questions, The Concept of Citizenship in International Law (Brill/Nijhoff, 2018) tackles first common theoretical aspects at a universal level to be followed later by the analysis of the regional aspects. It tries to deepen the ongoing discussion in the scientific community and among the greater public on nationality and citizenship issues.

Contributors are: Jaqueline Berndt, Joseph Bills, Michael Emmerich, Adam L. Kern, Fumiko Kobayashi, Frederick Feilden, Laura Moretti, Matsubara Noriko, Satō Satoru, Satō Yukiko, Satoko Shimazaki, Takagi Gen, Tanahashi Masahiro, Ellis Tinios, Tsuda Mayumi and, Glynne Walley.

Discount code 72435 for 35%. Valid till 31 Dec, 2024.

In Priesthood, Cult, and Temple in the Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran: Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonean Jewish Literary Tradition (Brill, 2023), Robert Jones analyzes how Israel's priestly institutions are represented in these writings, and he demonstrates that they are essential for understanding the Jewish priesthood at this crucial stage in its history.

The fall of the empire and the occupation of Japan by the United States created conditions favorable for heroin use, followed, in time, by glue sniffing and psychedelic mushroom ingestion.

By illuminating the neglected history of drugs, Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan (Brill, 2023) highlights both the transnational embeddedness and national peculiarities of the "politics of consumption" in Japan.

Yushuang Yao is an Associate Professor at Fo Guang University, Taiwan, specializing in contemporary religions of Taiwan. She is also a research fellow at Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, and currently professorial fellow at the University of Tartu with "Taiwan Studies Programme”.

Heidi Maiberg, the host of the episode, is the Head of Communication at the University of Tartu Asia Centre.

In this episode I speak with Professor Tahera Qutbuddin who has provided us with a majestic and brilliant complete English translation of Nahj al-Balagha titled Nahj al-Balāgha: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ‘Alī (Brill, 2024), a parallel English-Arabic text published open access by Brill. The publication of this volume is an event of seismic importance in the study of Islam, religion, and Arabic. Qutbuddin’s translation is animated with the purpose of rendering the Arabic text of Nahj al-Balagha in English in a fashion that amplifies its literary and philosophical potency, a task at which she excels throughout the translation. The experience of reading this translation is nothing short of a deeply moving, philosophically enriching, and linguistically powerful rhapsody. In addition to an eminently user friendly translation with the particular sections and moments of Nahj al-Balagha clearly marked out, Qutbuddin also presents an erudite account of the text’s reception, reception history, and archival density. This outstanding volume will also be a joy to teach and use as primary source material in a range of courses on Islam, religion, Arabic, and the Humanities more broadly.

SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. Listener feedback is most welcome.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network.

Korean Art since 1945: Challenges and Changes (Brill, 2024) is volume 9 in the series Modern Asian Art and Visual Culture. The book draws on primary sources to discuss the ideological stakes that affected the art world, modernist art vs. political art, and the fluidity of concepts such as tradition and national identity. Moreover, the book also has a chapter on the art of North Korea. The book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in Korean studies or contemporary art.

Dr. Youngna Kim is Professor Emerita of the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul National University and was the Director of the National Museum of Korea from 2011 until 2016. Dr. Kim received her bachelor’s degree from Muhlenberg College and her Ph.D. in the History of Art from The Ohio State University. She has many publications to her name about Korea’s ever-evolving art scene.

Buy Youngna Kim’s new book about Korean art before independence (only available in Korean) here.

Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and lives in Seoul, South Korea. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo.

In Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism (Brill, 2024), Joshua Paul Smith addresses the consensus for the supposedly Gentile Luke and concludes that no solid New Testament or patristic evidence exists to substantiate such a claim. Moreover, Smith suggests by means of a cognitive linguistic analysis of insider and outsider terms in Luke and Acts, as well as their author’s attitudes toward the Torah and intricate knowledge of Jewish festival celebrations, that these books were more likely to have been written by an individual enculturated in “a Jewish setting … among the Hellenistic Jewish diaspora” (p. 233). Smith joined the New Books Network to discuss this revision of his Ph.D. thesis, our ability to know an ancient author through their textual remains, and why it would be inappropriate to interpret Luke’s full-throated embrace of the Gentile mission as an indicator of his non-Jewish identity.

Joshua Paul Smith (Ph.D., University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology, 2021) teaches presently at Southeast Missouri State University. His research interests include literary and cognitive approaches to New Testament texts, as well as early Jewish and Christian identity formation. He is currently working on a short book on Acts for a general audience, and conducting research for an article that applies social network analysis to named characters in Luke and Acts. Additionally, he serves as Managing Editor for Reviews of the Enoch Seminar, publishing book reviews on a wide range of topics related to the study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic origins.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

These fluctuating identities found expression in their art, as did their wartime fate as refugees, camp inmates, partisans and survivors. A wealth of newly-discovered images, diaries and letters highlight this little-known aspect of Jewish life and art in Yugoslavia, illuminating a turbulent era that included integration into a newly-founded country, the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and renewal in its aftermath.

Join us as we speak with Wally Cirafesi, whose book, John Within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel (Brill, 2021), offers a reading of the Gospel of John as an expression of the fluid and flexible nature of Jewish identity in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Wally V. Cirafesi obtained his PhD from the University of Oslo, where he is Visiting Researcher in the Faculty of Theology. He has published on a range of topics related to the New Testament, ancient Judaism, and early Christianity, including Verbal Aspect in Synoptic Parallels (Brill, 2013).

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption(IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

The aim of Sarah Cassella's book Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023) is threefold: to identify the main elements that characterise global risks in a legal perspective, to determine the characteristics that make them a new category of risk, and to analyse the changes they bring about in the main mechanisms of international law. Drawing on the relationship between international law and other legal systems, and in particular national law, this book highlights possible responses to the challenges posed by global risks. The study is based on extensive practice related to the examples of climate change and pandemics, but opens up perspectives on conclusions that could be common to other global risks, such as financial risks or cyber risks.

Sarah Cassella, Ph.D. (2009), is Professor of International Law at Université Paris.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

This book is available open access here. 

Görkem Akgöz is is a post-doc researcher at Humboldt University and a lecturer at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Y. Tzvi Langermann teaches in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability studies.

Join us as we speak with Robin Baker about his monograph on the Book of Judges!

Robin Baker is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the School of History, Archaeology and Philosophy, at University of Winchester, and Fellow of University College London. His latest monograph is Mesopotamian Civilization and the Origins of the New Testament (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

These are some of the questions at the heart of this fascinating conversation about two books that probe the theoretical and instrumental underpinnings, as well as the everyday practice, of law in different periods and regions of the Russian Empire. Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge UP, 2012) by Nancy Kollmann analyzes the day-to-day practice of Russian criminal justice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Visions of Justice: Sharī’a and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (Brill, 2017; available open access) by Paolo Sartori excavates civil law practice to explore legal consciousness among the Muslim communities of Central Asia from the end of the eighteenth century through the fall of the Russian Empire, situating his work within a range of debates about colonialism and law, legal pluralism, and subaltern subjectivity. Paolo Sartori and Nancy Kollmann explore overlaps, divergence and much more that emerge from their respective findings in these deeply researched books.

Paolo Sartori is a Senior Research Associate and the Chairman of the Commission for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and the Journal of Central Asian History (Brill). In addition to Visions of Justice, authoring several scholarly articles and co-editing essay collections, Sartori has co-authored two books, Seeking Justice at the Court of the Khans of Khiva (19th–Early 20th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2020), co-authored with Ulfat Abdurasulov and Éksperimenty imperii: adat, shariat, i proizvodtsvo znanii v Kazakhskoi stepi (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2019), co-authored with Pavel Shabley.

Nancy Kollmann is the William H. Bonsall Professor of History at Stanford University in California. In addition to Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (2012), she is the author of Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547 (1987), By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (1999); The Russian Empire, 1450–1801 (2017), and Visualizing Russia in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming August 2024).

Responding to publications about the Western European and American exile experience of the Jews after 1933, Bojan Aleksov's book Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945 (Brill, 2023) offers comparative insights into the less trodden paths of the persecuted, illuminating the cultural and political context of the Balkan host countries, the response of local Jewish communities, and the reactions of common people and assorted criminals. The Balkans, often marginalized and loathed, emerges in hundreds of personal accounts of survivors gathered here, supplemented by extensive archival research, as a welcoming getaway, where thousands survived thanks to the Italian occupiers, illiterate peasants, and Communist-led Partisan resisters.

Translations:

-Lucan: Jane Wilson Joyce

-Valerius Flaccus: P.J. Davis

-Statius' Thebaid: Jane Wilson Joyce

-Statius' Achelleid: Stanley Lombardo

-Silius Italicus: Neil Bernstein and Antony Agoustakis

Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History.

When Yugoslavia was created in 1918, noble landowners still possessed vast parts of its territory especially in the northwestern half of the country which had formerly belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy. With approximately 38,000 hectares, Prince Albert of Thurn and Taxis was the largest private owner of forests in the new kingdom. Yugoslav politicians demanded an expropriation, justifying their actions on the grounds of social and historical justice. At the same time, political and business networks attempted to appropriate the property themselves. The parties involved - Thurn and Taxis, Yugoslav officials, national and international companies - fought for their interests using various means, from lawsuits to international arbitrage and political lobbyism. 

Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool.

Jason Read is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. In addition toThe Politics of Transindividuality, he is also the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx on the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY, 2003).

This special issue of International Journal of Islam in Asia (Sept, 2023) instead offers fine-grained investigations on technology and labour; print landscapes, networks and actors; subaltern languages; and popular Islam. We critique the idea of an “epistemic rupture” brought about by colonial modernity, providing a more systematic analysis of continuities and changes in Islamic knowledge economy. Examining two centuries of print authored by South Asian Muslims, the articles in the issue provide new ways of thinking about questions of knowledge production, distribution, circulation and reception. The issue broadens the scope of earlier scholarship, examining genres such as cosmology, divination, devotional poems, salacious songs, romances and tales of war in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, dobhāṣī do Bangla, Arabic Malayalam, Sindhi, Balochi and Brahui. The articles show the different ways that pre-colonial practices and cultures of writing and reading persisted in the print landscape, in terms of copying, adaptation, translation and circulation of texts. They inquire into new technologies, labour and networks that evolved, and how it provided fertile ground for both new and traditional forms of religious activities and authorities. The articles present new Muslim publics, geographies, and imaginaries forged through the vernacularisation of Islam, and their relationship to the transnational or global community.

Nur Sobers-Khan is a researcher and curator of Islamic manuscripts, art and archival collections. She served as director of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, a research centre and archive for the study of visual culture, architecture and urbanism in Muslim societies (2021-22).

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Open Access link to the book.

Chet Van Duzer is an historian and project manager for the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

Martina Mampieri has been granted a special mention of excellence in the Alberigo Award 2021 by the European Academy of Religion and Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose.

Nation & Ethnicity is a long volume that will delight serious scholars in its meticulously detail and attention to language in translation. The ethical stakes raised by Schneider’s project, however, should interest a broad audience working in Chinese studies. In the podcast, we will lay out Schneider’s arguments, theories of nationalism that inform her work, and the historical context against which her protagonists wrote. While new to the podcast, the book has been out for several years, so in addition to learning about this monograph, we will also get to hear about some new publications—Prof. Schneider’s related recent article on Chinese nationalism.

Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

Female-Voice Song and Women's Musical Agency in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2022) brings together seventeen essays, each of which newly identifies contributions to musical culture made by women before 1500 across Europe. Encompassing not only medieval French, English, and Italian culture, but also stretching to Iceland and the Islamicite courts, this volume speaks to the various ways in which we can hear women’s voices through history.

Prof. Lisa Colton and Dr. Anna Kathryn Grau jointly edited this collection, in addition to contributing chapters to it. In this episode, they speak with Áine Palmer about the study of women’s participation in medieval musical culture, the process of putting together an edited volume such as this, and share insights on their own analyses of 13th-century French motets.

Further Reading and Listening:

For those interested, you can here performer’s renditions of some of the songs and motets mentioned in Anna’s chapter here, here, and here, and a rendition of the motet Lisa’s chapter focuses on can be found here.

Those interested in Bahktinian approaches to early music should also read Helen Dell, Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song (Woodbridge: Suffolk, 2008), particularly chapters 5 and 6, and Anna Kathryn Grau ‘Hearing Voices: Heteroglossia, Homoglossia, and the Old French Motet’ in Musica Disciplina 58 (2013), pp. 73-100.

Prof. Lisa Colton can be found on Twitter at @elsie33, and you can find Dr. Anna Kathryn Grau at @AnnaKathrynGrau.

Aine Palmer is a PhD candidate in the Music Department at Yale.

Tune in as we speak with Timothy Christian whose recent book answers those questions by exploring insinuatio, the Greco-Roman rhetorical convention used to address prejudiced or controversial topics—like resurrection—at the end of a discourse. The book is Paul and the Rhetoric of Resurrection: 1 Corinthians 15 as Insinuatio (Brill, 2022).

Timothy J. Christian is Adjunct Professor of Christian Studies & Philosophy at Asbury University and Associate Pastor of Wesley UMC in Canton, IL.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu.

Join us as we speak with Mark Giacobbe about his recent book, Luke the Chronicler: The Narrative Arc of Samuel-Kings and Chronicles in Luke-Acts (Brill, 2023).

Mark S. Giacobbe earned his PhD at Westminster Theological Seminary, and is Teaching Pastor at Citylight Church in Philadelphia, PA. He also serves as adjunct faculty at Dallas International University in the Applied Linguistics Department.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu.

Xiaoning’s research focuses on the complex relationship between cultural production and state governance in modern China. She is the author of Moulding the Socialist Subject: Cinema and Chinese Modernity 1949-1966 (Brill, 2020) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (OUP, 2020). Her writings on various aspects of Chinese socialist cinema and culture have appeared in journals and edited collections, including Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Contemporary China, Chinese Film Stars, Maoist Laughter, Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes and Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution. She was recently a recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship through which she researched transnational film practices in the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1989.

In addition to her scholarly work, Xiaoning is passionate at introducing contemporary Chinese films to UK audiences. With colleagues at Shanghai Art Film Federation, she co-curated Chinese Art Film Festival London Showcase from 2016 to 2018 exploring social and cultural issues in contemporary Chinese society, including the persistence of traditional values in China’s modernization and Chinese women’s filmmaking. Recognized for her regional expertise, she was invited to provide advice on China-related cultural production for the National Theatre, RDF television, and other media companies in the UK.

Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

Dr. Liana Saif pays special attention to intercultural exchanges of esoteric and occult ideas between the Islamicate and Latinate worlds all the way to the European Renaissance, as reflected in her first monograph “The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She explores there the Islamic scientific and natural-philosophical foundations of the theories of astral influences that “naturalised” astrology and astral magic, becoming sciences that explore the dynamics that link the terrestrial and celestial worlds, thus co-producing knowledge about nature and the cosmos, and resulting in a universe more intelligible to both Muslim scientists and philosophers, and their European counterparts.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of the occult sciences and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity, and greed.”

Marco Caboara is the Digital Scholarship & Archives Manager at the Lee Shau Kee Library at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

In this interview, Marco and I talk about this project, what it says about how Europeans understood China, and his favorite maps in the collection.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Regnum Chinae. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Maxwell Kennel is Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Social Accountability at NOSM University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

W. Gil Shin earned his PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is Affiliate Professor of New Testament. He has published books and articles, including CEB Gospel Parallels (2012).

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu.

Jonathan Abel is Assistant Professor of Military History at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Bruce Pass is a senior honorary research fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has published numerous articles on Bavinck and modern theology. For the interested listener, Bruce Pass has been on the podcast before to talk about his book The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2020).

Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales.

Justine Esta Ellis received a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is the Associate Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

Previous studies suggest that continental spoils were perceived as an inferior and problematic category, and that Catholic books in particular were hard to accommodate in Protestant libraries. However, by considering systems of classification and collection orders of archives and libraries, Hagström Molin unearths a much more complex history of how plundered knowledge was appreciated, used and fused with its new Swedish settings. Moreover, spanning a history of four hundred years, this book shows that the understanding of spoils changed significantly over time. Molin demonstrates the value of studying classification and provenance, and the importance in considering how contextual time and space shapes the meaning of texts.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Lucien van Liere and Erik Meinema's book Material Perspectives on Religion, Conflict, and Violence: Things of Conflict (Brill, 2022) explores relations between materiality, religion, and violence by drawing upon two fields of scholarship that have rarely engaged with one another: research on religion and (violent) conflict and the material turn within religious studies. This way, this volume sets the stage for the development of new conceptual and methodological directions in the study of religion-related violent conflict that takes materiality seriously.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. Student working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.

Join us as we speak with Joshua Berman about his book Narrative Analogy in the Hebrew Bible: Battle Stories and Their Equivalent Non-battle Narratives (Brill, 2004).

Joshua A. Berman is a Lecturer in the Department of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His other books include The Temple: Its Symbolism and Meaning Then and Now, also Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, and Ani Maamin, a book on biblical criticism.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

Dr. Yi Ren is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Alfrid Bustanov and Vener Usmanov's book Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia (Brill, 2022) tells a dramatic story of ’Abd al-Majid al-Qadiri, a Muslim individual born in the Kazakh lands and brought up in the Sufi environment of the South Urals, who memorized the entire Qur’an at the Mosque of the Prophet. In Russia he travelled widely, performing the Qur'an recitations. The Stalinist terror was merciless to him: in total, he spent fifteen years of his life in labour camps in Solovki, in the North, and Tashkent, in the south. At the end of his life, al-Qadiri wrote the fascinating memoirs that we analysed and translated in this book for the first time. Al-Qadiri’s life account allows us to look at the history of Islam in Russia from a new angle. His lively language provides access to everyday concerns of Russia’s Muslims, their personal interactions, their emotions, and the material world that surrounded them. Al-Qadiri’s book is a book of memory, full of personal drama and hope.

Alfrid Bustanov is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam

Aruuke Uran Kyzy is a History Ph.D. student at Stanford University in the Transnational, Global, and International (TIG) field with a focus on trans-imperial Naqshbandiyya Sufi networks across the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Central Asia near the turn of the 18th century.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

In Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin (Brill, 2022), Kobi Peled, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes a corpus of poetry collected among the Bedouin of the Negev Desert over the past 100 years for themes of political resistance, dissidence, and reactions to the political changes facing the Negev Bedouin. The poems reveal how the Negev Bedouin responded to and perceived changes in state authority and rule from the late Ottoman period to the contemporary state of Israel. Peled argues that in addition to being a creative and artistic mode of expression, poetry and a close reading of Bedouin poetry can serve as a lens onto Bedouin worldviews, sentiments, and reactions to and participation in processes political formations and state-building undergone in the Negev region during the 20th century.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research fellow at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy at the NOVA University Lisbon, where he works at the intersection of literature and philosophy. He is a coeditor of several books; Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (2021), Faces of the Self: Autobiography, Confession, Therapy (2019), Nietzsche and Pessoa: Ensaios (2016), and Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (2015).

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

Tune in as we speak with Pieter de Vries about his monograph, The Kābôd of YHWH in the Old Testament: With Particular Reference to the Book of Ezekiel (Brill, 2015).

Pieter de Vries is assistant professor of biblical theology and hermeneutics at Free University of Amsterdam. He is also a scholar of Christian doctrine, with a thesis on John Owen.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

In this episode of Humanities Matter, Dr. Laura Petican, art historian and curator, and Dr. Jacque Lynn Foltyn, Professor of Sociology, Program Director BA Sociology, National University, San Diego, explore various disciplinary, professional, and creative perspectives to expand their proposition that fashion is about self-presentation. In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity, published by Brill and edited by Drs. Petican and Foltyn, is a deep exploration of fashion representations; being fashionable, shopping, luxury, and vintage; fashion materials, craft, industry, and innovation; museum-worthy fashion; and fashioning cultural identities.

Summary: A conversation on the cultural, commercial, and creative perspectives of what it means to be ‘in fashion’ in the modern world.

The book sets the context within which further exploration of postcolonial biblical critical work can take place and lays out the challenges of intersectional work with queer studies, terrorism studies, technology, and ecological studies as future tasks.

Summary: A discussion on the interpretations of the Bible as a tool of colonialism and imperialism.

Lucia Fernandez Amaya is Professor in English at the Department of Philology and Translation, Pablo de Olavide University in Seville.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.

Yin Cao is associate professor and Cyrus Tang Scholar in the Department of History at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. He studies global history, modern Indian history, the British Empire, and India-China connections.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

In this episode we discussed the life and memoirs of Niqula Khoury with Sarah Irving and Charbel Nassif, two of three editors of the book (Karene Sanchez is the third) which is also available as open access at here.

Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref

So what is it like to be living in a nation you weren’t born in? What are the stories and experiences of people who find themselves alternating between two linguistic and cultural worlds?

In this new episode, Luis Javier Pentón Herrera and Ethan Tính Trịnh, editors of “Critical Storytelling: Multilingual Immigrants in the United States” talk about how their book brings together powerful voices of immigrants living in the United States. The book is a fusion of narratives by individual immigrants—each story offering a fresh perspective on living as a trans-national person in the United States and containing strong messages of acknowledgment, negotiation, and resilience.

This episode is a part of a new special series by Brill, which focuses on Brill’s commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Each episode is related to a specific SDG. This episode covers SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities.

In the third episode of our new themed series Migration, Dr. Sarah Peck, a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Centre for International Development in Northumbria University, examines the role of diaspora in the development of a state, in the context of her work “Re-orienting the Diaspora–Development Nexus”, published by Brill.

Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia.

The pieces of this history include the Jerusalem grand mufti’s appeal to Pius XII to support the Arab cause, the Catholic liturgies for peace and international mobilization during the Palestine War and Suez crisis, refugees petitioning the patriarch for aid, and Jewish converts establishing Christian kibbutzim. New archival collections and records reveal hidden aspects of the lives of women, children and other silenced actors, faith communities and religious institutions during and after 1948, connecting narratives that have been marginalized by a dominant historiography more focused on military campaigns or confessional conflicts.

A Liminal Church weaves diocesan history with global history. In the momentous decade from 1946 to 1956, the study of the transnational Jerusalem Latin diocese, as split between Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Cyprus, with ties to diaspora and religious international networks and comprising clergy from all over the world, attests to the possibilities of contrapuntal narratives, reintroducing complexity to a deeply and painfully polarized debate, exposing false assumptions and situating changes and ruptures in a long-term perspective.

Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter: @robbyref

But this problem does not affect just fishers: it is much more layered than we think and can impact most of our lives. How, exactly?

Prof. Vasco Becker-Weinberg from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and author of “Time to Get Serious about Combating Forced Labour and Human Trafficking in Fisheries,” explains further, in the fourth episode of our new themed series In Chains.

In the second episode of our new themed series Migration, Dr. André W.M. Gerrits, professor of International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University, talks about the changing political players in the Central Asian region and its implications and way forward for the EU and Russia, in the context of his work “Central Asia Under Brussels’ and Moscow’s Eyes”, published by Brill.

In this new episode, Dr. Bart Wallet, Professor of Jewish History at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Dr. Laura Almagor, Lecturer in Twentieth Century European History at the University of Sheffield, discuss the diversity in Yiddish language, its origins, and challenges, based on the recently published collection of articles titled “Yiddish in Europe” in the European Journal of Jewish Studies.

The authors argue the merits of delving deeper into the intricacies of the Yiddish language as an integral part of Jewish studies and bringing it to the public eye.

To answer this question, the edited volume Conflicting Memories: Tibetan History under Mao Retold (Brill, 2020) explores the writings of a range of both Han-Chinese and Tibetan writers, including official historians, unofficial autobiographers, memoirists, filmmakers, fiction-writers, and oral raconteurs. In addition to providing translated extracts from their work, the volume contains chapters of essays by renowned scholars of modern Tibetan history discussing the narratives produced, what types of people were producing them, what means they used, what aims they pursued, and in what ways did Tibetan accounts differ from those of Han-Chinese writers.

Robert Barnett is currently a Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and an Affiliated Lecturer at King’s College, London. He founded and directed the Modern Tibetan Studies program at Columbia University in New York from 1999 to 2018 and was the author and editor of a number of books on modern Tibet.

Françoise Robin teaches Tibetan language and literature at Inalco (French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations). She has been engaged in Tibetan studies for the last 25 years, observing the evolution of Tibetan society under the political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination of China. Her Ph.D. was the first to explore contemporary Tibetan Literature and its relevance to our understanding of today’s Tibetan society.

Benno Weiner is an Associate Professor of Chinese History at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, which came out in 2020 with Cornell University Press. His other writings include, most recently, an essay entitled “Centering the Periphery: Teaching about Ethnic Minorities and Borderlands in PRC History,” which was published by The PRC History Review.

Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping the history of transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

In the first episode of our new themed series Migration, Dr. Elspeth Guild, Jean Monnet Professor ad personam at Queen Mary, University of London, takes us through the trajectory of abolition and re-introduction of border control in the Schengen states from its formation in 1985 to the present day, in the context of her work “Schengen Borders and Multiple National States of Emergency: From Refugees to Terrorism to COVID-19”, published by Brill.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

In the second episode of our new themed series In Chains, we speak with Dr Alexis Jonathan Martig, Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta, Instructor at MacEwan University, and author of the article “Slaving Zones, Contemporary Slavery and Citizenship: Reflections from the Brazilian Case”.

Dr Martig explores modern day slaving zones, their relation to socio-economic precariousness, and what their existence means for citizenship in the 21st century.

In this new episode, Steven Fine, Dean Pinkhos Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, and Director of the YU Center for Israel Studies and of the Israelite Samaritans Project, traces the history of the Samaritans from the ancient times to the present, while discussing his work, The Samaritans: A Biblical People.

Join us as speak with Jaap Dekker about his contribution to Covenant, which considers an elusive reference to the Davidic covenant within the book of Isaiah.

Jaap Dekker is Professor of Biblical Studies and Christian Identity on the Henk de Jong Chair at the Theological University of Kampen, the Netherlands. He is widely published, with many published studies focusing on the book of Isaiah. 

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

In the third episode of our new themed series In Chains, we speak with Dr. Alexis Aronowitz from University College Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, who is the author of the article, “Regulating business involvement in labor exploitation and human trafficking”.

In her article, Dr. Aronowitz has presented various case studies of labor exploitation in the service industry, such as the cocoa industry in sub-Saharan Africa. In this episode, she further talks about how exploitative labor in businesses can be regulated using various approaches.

In the first episode of our new themed series called In Chains, we speak with Dr. Raphaël Lambert, Professor at the Department of British and American Cultural Studies, Kansai University, Kyoto. Prof. Lambert is the author of the Brill book “Narrating the Slave Trade: Theorizing Community.”

Prof. Lambert offers a glimpse into slave trade through the prism of community, telling us how community is relevant to slave trade as they’re both closely related to human experience.

In this episode, Dr. Ulrich Schmiedel, Lecturer in Theology, Politics and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, and Dr. Joshua Ralston, Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, help listeners find answers to these questions with respect to Europe and America through a discussion of their book "The Spirit of Populism: Political Theologies in Polarized Times."

Edward Jones Corredera is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 2020.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

In this new episode, François Guesnet, Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London, traces the travails and triumphs of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, based on his edited volume, “Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present.”

The book offers insights into different aspects of Jewish sociopolitical life through expert translation of narrative sources in Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and other languages into English.

Following Marx, Bannerji argues that social inquiry and critique must start with everyday life as it is lived, with the various social formations and relations generating various forms of consciousness. From this rather humble starting point, Bannerji is poised to enter into a productive dialogue with various other thinkers, particularly Lukacs, Gramsci and Dorothy Smith. She is also able to tackle questions of education, economics, race, gender, narrative, history, colonialism and emancipation. Tying these threads together is no easy task, but in working her way through an assortment of different themes and thinkers, Bannerji helps clarify the ways in which disparate elements of reality are tied to one another and cannot be understood in isolation. Readers will find this book to be overflowing with insights, and endlessly clarifying in the struggle to understand who we are, what we know, and what we can do.

Shortlisted for the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, the book was published as part of the Historical Materialism book series, and was published first by Brill and then by Haymarket.

Himani Bannerji is professor emeritus of sociology at York University. Her publications include Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology, Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism and Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism.

In this podcast, Dr. Lauren Cifuentes discusses her book A Guide to Administering Distance Learning, published by Brill, and talks about how she was preparing for a shift to the online model of education even before the pandemic. She believes that with the right infrastructure and resources it can be better than traditional learning.

In this podcast, Susana Gonçalves and Suzanne Majhanovich discuss their book Pandemic, Disruption and Adjustment in Higher Education and talk about the changing needs of students today, the challenges of tailoring higher education to be in tandem with the growing world of technology, and how to maintain integrity and mental health in the face of it all.

In this podcast, Dr. Rosemary Sage and Dr. Riccarda Matteucci discuss their book How World Events are Changing Education and talk about education in their day, what it has become for Gen Z, and lessons from pockets of the world where robots, online learning, and the science of human interest have been accounted for in education programs.

In a special episode that combines two of our ongoing themed series, Survival by Degrees and Quality Education, Radhika Iyengar and Christina T. Kwauk, co-editors of the book “Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action”, urge readers to pay attention to climate change in education, not just as a peripheral topic, but as a core part of curriculum design and implementation.

Dr. Joshua Coutts is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Providence Theological Seminary (Otterburne, MB). He completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. His most recent publication, The Divine Name in the Gospel of John, was published in 2017 by Mohr Siebeck (NBN Interview here).

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

In the newest episode of our podcast, Quality Education, Dr. Jameson Brewer, Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of North Georgia and author of ‘Homeschooling: A Guidebook of Practices, Claims, Issues, and Implications’, published by Brill, talks in detail about the changing trends in home-schooling practices. His compelling evidence makes us rethink our perception of formal education and lays bare the reality of educating a child without the support of experts or an educational system.

We discuss how COVID-19, and socioeconomic, political, and racial status (among other factors), influence a parent’s decision of choosing a school for their child.

Higher education has traditionally been viewed as a privilege affordable to only specific strata of society, mainly higher income groups. However, this trend is now changing, with governments and institutes actively trying to make higher education accessible to all.

In this episode, we chat with Dr. Budd Hall, from the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada, and Dr. Rajesh Tandon, the Founder-President of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, a global research and training centre based in New Delhi, India. Dr. Hall and Dr. Tandon are both UNESCO co-chairs in community-based research and social responsibility in higher education.

Drawing insights from their book, “Socially Responsible Higher Education: International Perspectives on Knowledge Democracy”, published by Brill, they talk about the various changes that have been implemented in different countries to ensure social inclusivity in higher education.

Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora.

In the fourth episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees, Dr. Anna Luisa Lippold, programme manager at THE NEW INSTITUTE, puts forth the suggestion that the responsibility for tackling climate change is a public notion, rather than an individual effort, in the context of her work “Climate Change and Individual Moral Duties”, published by Brill.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people

In this new episode, Anthony John Spalinger, Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Auckland, paints a captivating picture of the pharaoh court, based on his work, “The Books behind the Masks – Sources of Warfare Leadership in Ancient Egypt. Ancient Warfare Series Volume 4.”

The book takes previous study of the leadership characteristics of the military pharaohs one step forward by analyzing the war records and literary compositions composed to glorify their rule.

Stepping into this difficult terrain is Daniel Andres Lopez with his massive book Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (Haymarket Books, 2020). Lopez’s work reconstructs Lukács’ thought of the 1920’s by putting it back into it’s tumultuous context, allowing us not only to get a close look at the theory, but it’s purpose in maintaining political, historical and philosophical clarity in a world filled with war, revolution and upheaval. Much like our current moment, Lukács occupied a time where everything seemed possible, but translating the infinite possibilities into concrete realities was a formidable challenge, and would require not only the courage to step into physical danger, but also political confusion. Nothing in this moment was guaranteed, so rigorous philosophical speculation was required, and Lukács stepped in to provide communists with a rigorous theoretical framework.

However, this book goes well beyond simply reconstructing Lukács theoretical output. Rather than be satisfied with writing a straightforward commentary, this book is interested in wrestling with Lukács’ successes as well as his limitations. To that effect, Lopez works through a number of critiques of Lukács, both of others as well as his own. This allows him to explore various other questions on the margins of Lukács’ work about the relation between philosophical theory and political practice, and the role of critical thinking in emancipatory movements. The scope and rigor of the text, as well as the various questions and themes it addresses, will make this an incredible resource not just for newcomers to Lukács, or those seasoned in his thought, but for all those interested in learning how to think, and how to translate that thinking into action.

Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series.

Daniel Andres Lopez is an honorary research associate with the Thesis Eleven Forum for Social and Political Theory. His work has appeared in a number of places, including the journal Historical Materialism. He is an editor at Jacobin.

While there’s no doubt that climate change affects all people across the board, its effect is manifold among socioeconomically vulnerable communities, and among women in particular.

In the third episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees, Prof. Nilufer Oral, Director of the Center for International Law, National University of Singapore, and member of the United Nations International Law Commission, takes a closer look at the place of gender in relation to climate change and oceans, in the context of her work “Climate Change, Oceans and Gender”, published by Brill.

Listners might also be interested in Sanskrit Flashcards, Sanskrit Posters, the Sanskrit Studies Podcast, and the Sanskrit Dictionary.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

In the third episode of our new themed series Across the Rainbow, catch us in discussion with Dr. Shanon Shah, Visiting Research Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London, and author of the article “Ethnicity, Gender and Class in the Experiences of Gay Muslims”.

Drawing from the well of personal experience, Dr. Shah delves into the ways in which multiple axes of social division, such as religion, ethnicity, gender, and class, interact differently in Malaysia, where Islam is the majority and official religion, and in Britain, where it is a minority religion, to produce varied outcomes for gay Muslim men and women in both countries.

Mark Somos, Ph.D. (2007 Harvard, 2014 Leiden), holds the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’s Heisenberg position. He wrote Secularisation and the Leiden Circle (Brill, 2011) and American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761–1775 (Oxford, 2019).

Anne Peters, Ph.D. (1994 Freiburg), is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, a Professor at Heidelberg, Freie Universität Berlin, and Basel, and L. Bates Lea Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

This is one of the animating ideas for my guest today, Ted Stolze, here to discuss his essay collection Becoming Marxist: Studies in Philosophy, Struggle, and Endurance (Haymarket Books, 2020). While Marx occupies a central place throughout the essays, readers will find engagements with a variety of figures, going back as far as Aristotle or the Apostle Paul, all the way up to the present with essays on Zizek and Deleuze. In between these poles are studies of Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel and many other early modern thinkers. Throughout the essays, Stolze puts Marxist practice in dialogue with philosophy and vice-versa, showing us how political struggle demands philosophical inquiry, not simply for the purpose of political and tactical clarity, but for the same reasons people have turned to philosophy for several millennia now. Socrates famously said the unexamined life is not worth living, kicking off an entire tradition of self-examination. It’s this tradition Stolze believes activists and organizers ought to draw on today to better understand what it might mean to become Marxist.

Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series.

Ted Stolze holds an M.A. in religion and a PhD in philosophy. He is an associate professor of philosophy at Cerritos College. He is the coeditor of The New Spinoza and has published numerous articles on philosophy, politics and religion.

How did a court in the Netherlands pass a ruling on a global company? Does the Paris Agreement hold for transnational private entities like Shell? What does this mean for corporations going forward?

In this second episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees, Andreas Hösli answers these and other questions in the context of his article “Milieudefensie v. Shell: A Tipping Point in Climate Change Litigation against Corporations?”, published by Brill.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

In this first episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees, Dr. Nicolas Graham describes the influence of fossil fuels in sustaining our unending quest for economic growth and profit. He also highlights the drastic changes needed along production lines to become eco-friendly. He talks about these in the context of his book “Forces of Production, Climate Change, and Canadian Fossil Capitalism,” published by Brill.

To that effect, Alan Shandro has stepped in with a book that seeks to do just that. Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle (Haymarket Books, 2015) is a sustained attempt to reread Lenin in light of Gramsci’s oft-ignored remark that Lenin was one of his biggest influences in developing his own theories of hegemony. The book spends the first couple chapters contextualizing Lenin by looking at some of his contemporaries, particularly Kautsky, Bernstein and Plekhanov, before turning to Lenin’s own works, and reading through them slowly and meticulously. The result is a study that works its way from Lenin’s writings in the 1890’s all the way to the end of his life in the 1920’s, giving us the ability to see Lenin’s development of ontological and epistemological themes that run throughout his life and work. While Shandro is not always easy to read, the book has a number of crucial insights for political organizers, and will repay serious effort. Many books have been written on Lenin over the years, but few have bothered to study his own work so meticulously and thoroughly.

Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series.

Alan Shandro is a professor of political theory, previously at Laurentian University, and is currently a visiting professor at York. He is on the editorial board for Science & Society.

In the fourth episode of our themed series Across the Rainbow, Dr. SJ Crasnow, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, and author of the article “The Legacy of ‘Gender Ideology.” Dr. Crasnow talks to us about the current state of anti-trans legislation in the U.S., and the role played by conservative Christianity in shaping it.

2021 marks the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth. To commemorate this occasion, join us in conversation with Prof. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, as she takes us through the brief-yet-colourful life, most notable works, and myths surrounding the celebrated Russian author.

The discussion is an extension of “The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review”, published by Brill and edited by Prof. Vladiv-Glover.

Given how our most commonplace experiences get filtered differently through the lens of our imaginations, it deeply influences everything we think about and do. For better or worse, imagination is “the resin that binds human civilization together.”

In this new episode, Keith Moser, Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mississippi State University, leads a thought-provoking discussion on “Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory”, which is one of the most compelling transdisciplinary examinations of imagination to date.

The book collates a colorful collection of radical and fresh perspectives about imagination, ranging from reflections on gendered imagination to the oft-overlooked worldview of ecocentrism. This collection is also one of the first academic publications to provide a much-needed platform to contemporary artists in its final section, “Artists Reflect on Imagination: An Imaginative Epilogue.”

The book was first published by Brill as part of the Historical Materialism book series, and is now available in paperback from Haymarket.

Lorenzo Fusaro received his PhD in international political economy at King's College, London. He is an associate professor of political economy at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico, and is also one of the editors of Revisiting Gramsci’s Laboratory.

Meryl Altman is Professor of English and Women's Studies at DePauw University.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

He explores how the Arch has been a symbol of subjugation as well as empowerment for both Jewish and Christian cultures as they evolved across centuries; how it is a door to the story of the Jewish community’s resilience; how it has inspired other monuments of power over globally; the layers of meaning it contains; and the reverberation, and thus enhancement, of its meaning in the digital age.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education.

They also reflect the equally renowned, well-developed system of education available to the residents of each country.

Despite the similarities, each country’s education system is distinct, thanks to their differing historical experiences and shifts in political climates. And the complexities of each system unfold neatly on pages of the school textbooks that have been used in each country throughout this time.

In this episode, Merethe Roos and Henrik Edgren, two of the editors of “Exploring Textbooks and Cultural Change in Nordic Education 1536–2020”talk about delving deep into the centuries-old history of the education systems in the Nordic countries through their school textbooks, right from the era of the Reformation in the 16th century and through the subsequent educational acts that shaped the systems in each country. Their book encapsulates the rich academic traditions in each country and highlights the role that textbooks have had to play in building each nation by influencing national cultural politics and legislation.

This episode is a part of a new special series by Brill, which focuses on Brill’s commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Each episode is related to a specific SDG. This episode covers SDG 4: Quality Education.

Thanks to generous support of the J. Gonda Fund Foundation, the e-book version of this volume is available in Open Access here. 

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

In the second episode of our new themed series Across the Rainbow, we speak with Dr. Ann Towns, Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenberg, and Dr. Katarzyna Jezierska, Associate Professor of Political Science at University West, both co-authors of the article “COVID-19 and Gender: A Necessary Connection in Diplomatic Studies”.

Drs. Towns and Jezierska explore how the move online has changed gender dynamics in diplomatic practices and how interactions between diplomats and civil society actors have altered, making a case for why gender needs to be a key focus area in diplomacy research in the time of COVID-19.

In Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives, Peacock provides a novel interpretive approach to the artistic practice of imaging women of consequence in the Dutch Golden Age. From the beginnings of the new Republic, visual celebrations of famous heroines who crossed gender boundaries by fighting in the Revolt against Spain or by distinguishing themselves in arts and letters became an essential and significant cultural tradition that reverberated throughout the long seventeenth century. This collective memory of consequential heroines who equaled, or outshone, men is frequently reflected in empowering representations of other female archetypes: authoritative harpies and noble housewives. Such enabling imagery helped in the structuring of gender norms that positively advanced a powerful female identity in Dutch society.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

Saaler shows how the elites of the modern Japanese nation-state went about constructing an iconography of national heroes to serve their agenda of instilling national (and nationalist) thinking into the masses. Based on a wide range of hitherto untapped primary sources, Saaler combines data-driven quantitative analysis and in-depth case studies to identify the categories and historical figures that dominated public space. 

Men in Metal also explores the agents behind this visualized form of the politics of memory and introduces historiographical controversies surrounding statue-building in modern Japan.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

In the first episode of our new themed series Across the Rainbow, Dr. Jayaprakash Mishra, a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India, shares with us why he chose to examine the emotions of guilt in South Asian families through a queer perspective, as explored in his article “Queering Emotion in South Asia: Biographical Narratives of Gay Men in Odisha, India”.

Dr. Mishra examines how and why gay men negotiate between heteronormative expectations and homoromantic desire.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

In this podcast, we discuss the concept and range of authoritarian modernization, Sukarno’s Guided Democracy as a revolution, the formation of a military elite and the connection between Cold War technical aid and democratic decline.

Farabi Fakih is a lecturer at the History Department at Gadjah Madah University in Indonesia and the head of the department’s graduate program. He received his PhD from Leiden University in 2014. His research interests center on Indonesian urban history and the political economy of the Indonesian state.

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien

This is the main argument of the book we’ll be discussing today, Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Balance Sheet. Originally published about 20 years ago in Italian, it has recently been delivered to English audiences by Gregor Benton and with an introduction by Harrison Fluss as part of the Historical Materialism book series. Clocking in at just over 1000 pages, it is both a literal and figurative bombshell, delivering a rigorous and systematic account of Nietzsche’s thought. A major part of the books length comes from the fact that Losurdo refuses to treat Nietzsche in isolation, and instead spends a large amount of time recreating Nietzsche’s various contexts, 19th century Germany and Europe more broadly, as a way of making the political orientation of Nietzsche’s thought all the more explicit. Through his investigation, Losurdo reveals a Nietzsche who is committed to fighting against the democratic movements happening all around him and being an advocate for a superior elite at the expense of everyone else, whose main purpose in life is to serve them.

Domenico Losurdo was an Italian Marxist historian and philosopher. 

Harrison Fluss received his PhD in philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is a professor at Manhattan College, NYC and wrote the introduction to the English edition of The Aristocratic Rebel.

Daniel Tutt studied at American University and the European Graduate School. He teaches in the philosophy department at George Washington University. He reviewed The Aristocratic Rebel for Historical Materialism.

In this episode, Dr. Sharon Hecker, art historian and curator, and author of a recent Brill publication on Medardo Rosso titled Finding Lost Wax: The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso, talks about how this sculptor took an age-old lost wax technique and remodeled it in radical ways and how his work and life are a reflection of art and artists in 19th century Italy and Paris.

Diving right into this debate is my guest today, Peter Drucker, here to discuss his book Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Brill, 2015). Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series, Drucker's book is unapologetically Marxist in its orientation and presents a massive history of sexual orientations and identity throughout much of human history, with particular focus on gender formations under colonialism, industrialization, and the more recent cases of Fordist and Neoliberal capitalism. However, Drucker also sees things that Marxists could learn from contemporary queer theory and practice as they try to navigate a world that was not designed for them, and as they try to build a better one.

Rich in information and attentive to historical detail, this book is a fascinating combination of history, queer theory and political science that will be helpful to everyone who hopes to someday see a world where we all belong.

Peter Drucker received his PhD in political science at Columbia University. A lifelong activist on the radical left, he has published widely on socialist theory and history, and has also written extensively on LGBTQ+ issues.

You can get The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900) at a discount at the Brill website by entering the code 72150 on check out. (Promo Code effective until May/31/2021)

Jingyi Li is a Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

In The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West (Brill, 2020), McNamara describes the sometimes adulatory, sometimes rather colonial, appreciation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his two visits to Britain in the early 1910s. But McNamara also suggests reasons why this extraordinary wave of interest in the Bahá’í faith was not sustained – not least because the crisis to all religions that was represented by the First World War.

Dr. Klaus Mainzer, Co-founder and Senior Professor at the Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Center of the University of Tübingen and President of European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg, explains this further in a new podcast episode, in which he talks about his book Leben als Maschine: Wie entschlüsseln wir den Corona-Kode? published by Brill. He explains how bringing together the fields of bioinformatics, machine learning, AI, and big data can help us to decipher the workings of the novel coronavirus and, perhaps, be better equipped to deal with such crises in the future.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Weishut assesses the vast cultural differences that he observed through this close friendship, which he describes as a ‘life-changing experience’, from the perspective of the psychologist Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Further, he provides interesting insights into this intercultural bond from a sociopolitical context. This discussion is an extension of his book titled “Intercultural Friendship: The Case of a Palestinian Bedouin and a Dutch Israeli Jew,” published in the International Comparative Social Studies series of Brill.

Louisiane Ferlier, Ph.D. (2012, Université Paris Diderot), is the Digital Resources Manager at Centre for the History of Science at the Royal Society. She has published articles on John Wallis, the Bodleian Library and cross-Atlantic circulation of books.

Bénédicte Miyamoto, Ph.D. (2011, Université Paris Diderot), is Associate Professor of British History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She has published on eighteenth-century drawing manuals, sales catalogues and art markets.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

In this episode, Dr. Mirella Klomp, of the Protestant Theological University, the Netherlands, discusses her book “Playing On: Re-staging the Passion after the Death of God,” published by Brill, and talks about how the Passion has seeped out from the liturgy to the wider cultural domain, why its story remains so popular today, whether depicting Christ in conjunction with popular music and pursuits is disrespectful, and whose story the Passion really is.

But finding the people behind this collection and decoding it have been journeys of their own. In this latest podcast episode, Dr. Diana Lange of Humboldt University, Germany, opens her book “An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama: A Journey of Discovery” published in Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library, and talks about how she made these journeys, what her experiences were of travelling to the region in the modern day, and the differences between Western and Eastern art and cartography.

In this podcast episode, Roger Patulny, Associate Professor at University of Wollongong, Australia, and Alberto Bellocchi, Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow, Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia answer some of these questions on the coping mechanisms of teachers, in terms of their emotions. This discussion is an extension of their study titled ‘Happy, Stressed, and Angry: A National Study of Teachers’ Emotions and Their Management’, published in the Brill journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society.

Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. You can tweet her and suggest books at @Candela_Marini

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

In this podcast episode, Roger Patulny, Associate Professor at University of Wollongong, Australia, and Alberto Bellocchi, Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow, Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia answer some of these questions on the coping mechanisms of teachers, in terms of their emotions. This discussion is an extension of their study titled ‘Happy, Stressed, and Angry: A National Study of Teachers’ Emotions and Their Management’, published in the Brill journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

In a new podcast, Dr. Judith Benz-Schwarzburg, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University for Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, talks about pertinent questions on studying the cognitive and emotional abilities of animals and why they are important. Her discussion is an extension of her book titled “Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers? Linking Animal Cognition, Animal Ethics & Animal Welfare,” published in the Human-Animal Studies series of Brill.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Amy Daughton, Lecturer and Head of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, discusses the importance of humanities amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This discussion is based on Prof Charlotte Hempel’s paper “Let’s hear it for the humanities in the fight against COVID-19,” originally published in Brill’s Religion Media Centre.

John Winthrop’s Journal reveals a deep desire for economic independence, or “competency,” born of his frustrations with his limited options in a cramped England, which he played out in a New World—a Promised Land—that he considered to be boundlessly fertile with possibility. Always expanding, Winthrop competed ruthlessly with the indigenous Americans in a “continuous process of rumors, intimidation, conflicts and negotiations, which Winthrop navigated with unwavering confidence in his own racial superiority” (p. 261). Settling the Good Land is a remarkable and magisterial study of a man who simultaneously held (and realized) these ambitions with one hand and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the other. Yet, he saw no conflict in them but rather the “fulfillment of his religious and personal calling” (p. 121).

Professor Delahaye teaches in Lyon at Université Lumière Lyon II and is a member of the interdisciplinary Triangle Research Group which combines “action, discourses, economic and political thought” to better understand the meeting of political ideas and consequences. Last year she received the rank of habilitation to direct doctoral theses, the highest rank in the French academic system.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

In this episode, Dr Robin Attfield, Professor Emeritus at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, talks about how Africa finds itself vulnerable to not only drought but also the flooding of its coastline, among other untoward environmental effects of climate change and civil war. And how it is in the best interest of African nations to develop in a climate-friendly manner.

This discussion is based on his paper “Africa and Climate Change” published in Brill’s Utafiti: Journal of African Perspectives.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Cali Buckley, of the Pennsylvania State University College, discusses how manikins grew as figures that mechanically and emotionally engaged with its owners, arousing their response. Her discussion is an extension of her paper “Pathos, Eros, and Curiosity: The History and Reception of Ivory Anatomical Models from the Seventeenth Century to Today,” which is published in the Brill journal Nuncius.

What are the foundations of Jewish architecture? And what cultures and ideologies have shaped it? With particular reference to Herod’s Temple, these are questions that Professor Steven Fine, Director at the Center for Israel Studies at Yeshiva University, discusses in this podcast, based on the Brill publication Jewish Religious Architecture: From Biblical Israel to Modern Judaism.

Elleni Centime Zeleke is Assistant Professor of African Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in New York. Elleni was born in Ethiopia, and raised in Toronto, Guyana, and Barbados. Trained at the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University (Toronto), her research interests include vernacular politics in the Horn of Africa, Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School, and the problem of constituting Africa as an object of study.

Listen to Mahmoud Ahmed’s Tizita. And read the review roundtable on Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory, with contributions by Alden Young, Samar al-Bulushi, Adom Getachew, and Wendell Marsh.

Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Christopher Ketcham, an independent researcher, discusses his theories on how studying the flower and honeybee facultative mutualism can help us to gain insight into the emergence of morality in nature. His discussion is an extension of his book “Flowers and Honeybees: A Study of Morality In Nature” published in the Critical Plant Studies series of Brill.

In this episode, Dr. Philip Drew, Associate Professor at Australia National University and Assistant Dean of Faculty of Law at Queens University, and Dr. Bruce Oswald, Professor at Melbourne Law School talk about what led to the events of 1994 and how it generated more focus on international communities’ responses to government-sponsored violence in the future. This discussion is an extension of a special issue of Brill’s Journal of International Peacekeeping, called “Rwanda Revisited: Genocide, Civil War, and the Transformation of International Law.”

By tracing pivotal judicial concepts such as ‘right of necessity’ and ‘subjective rights’ back to their medieval versions, and by situating them in unexpected contexts such as the Franciscans’ theory of poverty and colonization or today’s immigration and border control, this volume invites its readers to consider whether individual rights were in fact, or at least in theory, available to the marginalized.

By focusing not only on the economically impoverished but also those who were disenfranchised because of disability, gender, race, religion or infidelity, this book also sheds light on the relationship between the early history of individual rights and social justice at the margins.

Jonathan Robinson, Ph.D. (2010) in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. He currently acts as a lawyer and is the author of William of Ockham’s Theory of Property Rights in Context (Brill, 2012).

Virpi Mäkinen is Senior Lecturer in Theological and Social Ethics at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Pamela Slotte is Associate Professor of Minority Studies at the Åbo Akademi University, Finland.

Heikki Haara is Senior Lecturer of Political History at the University of Helsinki.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London

In this episode, Dr. Philip Drew, Associate Professor at Australia National University and Assistant Dean of Faculty of Law at Queens University, and Dr. Bruce Oswald, Professor at Melbourne Law School talk about what led to the events of 1994 and how it generated more focus on international communities’ responses to government-sponsored violence in the future. This discussion is an extension of a special issue of Brill’s Journal of International Peacekeeping, called “Rwanda Revisited: Genocide, Civil War, and the Transformation of International Law.”

This book is available open access here.

Martin Gansten, Ph.D. (2003), Lund University, is a Sanskritist and historian of religion specializing in Indic religions as well as the global transmission history of horoscopic astrology.

For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship.

Although studies on the history of the idea of Europe abound, much of the vast body of early modern sources has still been neglected. Assuming that discourses tend to transcend linguistic, historical and generic boundaries, Contesting Europe: Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses on Europe, 1400–1800 (Brill) has gathered experts from various fields of study who examine vernacular and Latin negotiations of Europe from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century.

This multi-angled approach serves to identify similarities and differences in the discourses on Europe within their different national and cultural communities.

Isabella Walser-Bürgler is principal investigator at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck (Austria). 

Nicolas Detering is a Junior Professor of German Literature at the University of Bern. 

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London.

In a new book titled “The Sign of the Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime as a Sign” published in the Brill Research Perspectives series, Joel West of the University of Toronto, Canada, analyzes the history and personality of the character, speculates on the character’s sexuality, and ultimately suggests what exactly gave the Joker his iconic status today.

Was the UN’s approach truly detached from the ground reality? In this podcast, Sam De Schutter discusses his award-winning paper “A Global Approach to Local Problems? How to Write a Longer, Deeper, and Wider History of the International Year of Disabled Persons in Kenya” published in Brill’s Diplomatica, where he argues that to get to the truth historians must go beyond the global-local dichotomy. Sam de Schutter won the Brill/Diplomatica Mattingly Prize 2019 for this paper.

In part 2 of this podcast episode, Cory Blad, Professor and Chair at Department of Sociology, Manhattan College, uses the example of Sweden and Finland to explain how neoliberalization plays a role in mitigating socioeconomic and political hardships—and how they can be overcome. His discussion is an extension of the book chapter “Searching for Saviors: Economic Adversities and the Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era,” which is published in the Brill series Critical Global Studies.

In part 1 of this podcast episode, Cory Blad, Professor and Chair at Department of Sociology, Manhattan College, uses the example of Sweden and Finland to explain how neoliberalization plays a role in mitigating socioeconomic and political hardships—and how they can be overcome. His discussion is an extension of the book chapter “Searching for Saviors: Economic Adversities and the Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era,” which is published in the Brill series Critical Global Studies.

In this podcast, Dr. Martin Edwards, a general practitioner and retired clinician affiliated to the University of London, discusses the British Medical Research Council’s exploitation of the term “controlled” to establish “controlled trials” as the gold standard for therapeutic evaluation. His discussion is an extension of his paper “Control and the Therapeutic Trial: Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain, 1918-48,” which is published in Brill’s Clio Medica.

Massimo Modonesi is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences Faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being ​Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject.​ He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci Society.

Maria Vignau served as a research assistant under Modonesi, and now teaches while working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In this podcast, Dr. Jorg Kinzig, Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Tubingen, discusses his explorations of why this is. What do acquittals entail? Does Germany need a system and policy change? Dr. Kinzig speaks based on his paper “The Acquittal (After Pretrial Detention)—a Rare but Fascinating Phenomenon of the Criminal Justice System”, published in Brill’s European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminal Justice.

For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship.

In this podcast, Dr. Candace C. Croney of Purdue University talks about commercial breeding practices in the United States, social opposition to the practice, and the potential consequences of its outright abolition on the beings central to the discussion: dogs themselves. Her discussion is an extension of her paper “Turning up the Volume on Man’s Best Friend: Ethical Issues Associated with Commercial Dog Breeding,” which is published in Brill’s Journal of Applied Animal Ethics Research.

In this podcast, Dr Ryan P. Burge, of the Eastern Illinois University, discusses how religious leaders use twitter today, whether successful tweeting means having conversations, and the extent to which evangelicals engage with politics on twitter. His discussion is an extension of his paper “Is Social Media a Digital Pulpit? How Evangelical Leaders Use Twitter to Encourage the Faithful and Publicize Their Work,” which is published in Brill’s Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture.

Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer.

In this episode, Dr. Adeyemi Balogun, from the University of Bayreuth in Germany, explores the fabric of the Yoruba society in terms of the founding and development of the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria, the impact of colonialism, and the transformation of Islam over the last 20 years. His discussion is based on his paper titled “‘When Knowledge is there, Other Things Follow’: The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria and the Making of Yoruba Muslim Youths”, published in Brill’s Islamic Africa.

Jaap Doedens is College associate professor at Pápa Reformed Theological Seminary in Hungary. He has published articles on the Old Testament, the intertestamental period, and the New Testament in English, Dutch, and Hungarian.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

Judit Kuschnitzki, a PhD student at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK, talks about how, when in crises, diplomats should make use of discretion, the power of free decision within certain legal bounds, in her study titled “Navigating Discretion: A Diplomatic Practice in Moments of Socio-political Rupture”, published in Brill’s The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. She explains how the notion of discretion is under-used in diplomacy research but is crucial when it comes to making situational judgement calls.

Dr Adam Talib, from Durham University, UK, explores these issues in his study titled “Al-Ṣafadī, His Critics, and the Drag of Philological Time”, published in Brill’s Phenomenogical Encounters. He focuses on the work and commentary of Al-Ṣafadī, a Turkic author, to show how modern scholarly agendas may have influenced the chronological plane of Arabic literature.

Dr. Simon Adams, Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, explores these and other questions in his recent paper “The Responsibility to Protect and the Fate of the Rohingya”, published in Brill’s Global Responsibility to Protect.

We live in a time of profound global crises. So, who exactly is responsible for identifying global solutions? Since there is no common world government, global issues are usually addressed by certain international institutions or organizations that develop laws, frameworks, and policies—a phenomenon called “global governance.” However, does this type of regulation actually work?

Prof Stephen Gill, FRSC, Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, discusses the current state of global governance and its role in resolving global issues, as documented in a new study in the journal Global Governance, published by Brill. Listen to this podcast now!

Dr Giles Scott-Smith, professor of New Diplomatic History at Leiden University and editor of Diplomatica, discusses these articles and the overall implications of Brexit for Britain. Listen to Part 1 of this podcast now!

What did the influential Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh actually look like? Popular culture and media have propagated the belief that there have been only two photographs of Vincent Van Gogh himself. If his written exchanges are to be believed, Vincent despised self-portrait photography. However, a recent breakthrough study in the Brill journal Oud Holland suggests that there are not just two photographs of Vincent Van Gogh. There is just one.

So, what about the second photograph?

Teio Meedendorp, Researcher at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, discusses the breakthrough discovery he made with his co-author Yves Vasseur, General Commissioner of Mons 2015 European Capital of Culture. Listen to this podcast now!

Dr Giles Scott-Smith, professor of New Diplomatic History at Leiden University and editor of Diplomatica, discusses these articles and the overall implications of Brexit for Britain. Listen to Part 2 of this podcast now!

Jason Read is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. In addition toThe Politics of Transindividuality, he is also the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx on the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY, 2003).

Schoneveld shows how Shirakaba arose in opposition to the statist art of the young Meiji state, the strategies deployed to promote its artistic agenda, how the group established sometimes tangible and direct personal, artistic, and ideological connections to the European artists who represented the ideal of individualism, and how the movement changed over time from an avant-garde bastion to become central to the mainstream of the Japanese art scene in the early 1920s. In addition, the book reveals dynamic tensions between statism and Shirakaba’s individualism, between the group’s ethos of individualism and the realities of being a collective, between being avant-garde and establishment, and between different generations of Shirakaba artists themselves, as well as between virtual and physical exhibition spaces and the status of original versus reproduced art. Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism is an important contribution not just to Japanese art history, but to rethinking the global spread, reception, and adoption and adaptation of modernity and modernism.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

The completion of this book has benefitted from Lorenzo joining the collaborative research project “East Asian Uses of the European Past” supported by the HERA network and led by Professor Joachim Kurtz.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Todd L. Patterson earned his PhD in 2012 from Trinity International University, and is assistant professor of Old Testament at Matej Bel University in Slovakia. He is also a co-chairman of the Pentateuch research group for the Institute for Biblical Research.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

The book is an indispensable resource for anybody working in the field of 20th century Chinese painting, highlighting the changing hierarchies, networks and discursive practices that constituted Republican Shanghai guohua.

Ricarda Brosch is a curatorial assistant at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin – Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com.

Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu.

Hala Auji is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She holds a PhD in art history from Binghamton University, State University of New York, an MA in Art Criticism & Theory from Art Center College of Design, and a BFA in graphic design from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests include: Arabic book and print culture, 19th-century Islamic art and architecture and the| history of modern science in the Islamic world, amongst many more. She can also be found at https://www.halaauji.net/

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

Nicholas G. Piotrowski, received his Ph.D. from Wheaton College in 2013. He is professor of biblical and theological studies at Crossroads Bible College and academic dean at Indianapolis Theological Seminary. Nicholas is co-founder and main speaker for the Fox Valley Theological Society and has also published with Tyndale Bulletin and Bulletin for Biblical Research.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu.

Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (bazzanea@lemoyne.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome.

Mark Calder is an honorary research fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He conducted his PhD fieldwork in Bethlehem focusing on Syriac Orthodox Christians.

Jason Clower is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico.

Ricardo Duchesne argues in his new The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Brill, 2011) that we have it all wrong. History, he claims, is driven by creative people and their ideas, not by the conditions they find themselves in. If you see a bit of Hegel and Nietzsche here, you are not wrong: Duchesne embraces them both (and throws in a considerable amount of Weber to boot). But he goes much further. He trys to demonstrate using the best literature available on a wide variety of topics that the Hegelian-Nietzschian view of historical development is correct. This is not a book of theory alone; it’s an attempt to empirically demonstrate a theory. Even more radically, Duchesne uses the Hegelian-Nietzschian view to argue that since the invasion of the Indo-Europeans, a pastoral people who were imbued with unique aristocratic-warrior ethos, the West has been more creative than other world historical civilizations, and that this creativity explains in large measure the “Great Divergence” that we have seen in modern time.

This is a challenging book, and one that requires study. It is not light reading. But anyone who is brave enough to try to understand what it says will be greatly rewarded. I know I was.

PS: Brill, could you please put out an affordable paperback edition of this book, or perhaps release it in electronic version once it’s been sold to all the libraries that will buy it?