New Books in Intellectual History

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability.The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, we sit down with Lindsay Stonebridge, author of We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (Hogarth, 2024) to explore the enduring relevance of Hannah Arendt’s thought. Stonebridge dives into Arendt’s remarkable ability to teach students how to think, not just what to think, and reflects on Arendt’s own intellectual journey—a mind in constant dialogue with itself. We discuss how Arendt’s conception of thinking serves as a powerful resistance to totalitarian ideologies, emphasizing the importance of critical engagement with the world. Stonebridge also unpacks Arendt’s belief in the necessity of natality—the idea that cultures open to new beginnings and the emergence of free individuals are essential for societal evolution. Central to Arendt’s vision of political community are the concepts of promises and forgiveness, which Stonebridge argues are not mere sentimental ideals but profound, deeply rooted principles with origins in Christian thought. Together, we examine how these ideas form the basis of a political community grounded in plurality, offering a timely framework for understanding freedom, responsibility, and the possibility of change in our world today. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that bridges philosophy, history, and the urgent questions of our time.Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In Ayesha Jalal’s latest work Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia (Routledge, 2024) readers are introduced to the “roshan khayali” (enlightened thought) of South Asian Muslim thinkers spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In the course of eleven chapters Jalal highlights the contributions of diverse Muslim voices to debates about reason, religion, liberality, belonging, and ideology. Familiar South Asian Muslim figures including Mirza Ghalib, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, and Fazlur Rahman are brought into conversation with perhaps lesser known intellectuals such as the mid-nineteenth century author Nazir Ahmad, or the twentieth-century artist Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi.Broad themes covered in the book include how these Muslims articulated notions of religion as faith (iman) as compared to religion as identity, South Asian Muslim contributions to global theories of modernity, reason, and “enlightened” thought, how thinkers within Muslim roshan khayali discourse constructed notions of gender and women’s autonomy, and the role of literature and the visual arts in genealogies of South Asian Muslim intellectual thought.Dr. Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University (USA). She was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1998. She is the author of numerous books and research articles, including The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985), Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (2000), and Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (with Sugata Bose, 2022).Dr. Jaclyn Michael is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Vittorio Bufacchi, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University College Cork, discusses his book, highlighting the profound relevance of Cicero in today's political climate. He contrasts Cicero's republican ideals with Julius Caesar's authoritarianism, emphasizing the importance of civic duty in a democracy. Bufacchi argues for the role of culture and philosophy in fostering morality and critiques contemporary wealth-driven politics. His insights offer a roadmap for modern citizens to engage meaningfully with their political landscape.

The Ethics of Karbala: Myths, Modernity, and Virtues of Nobility (Routledge, 2024) investigates the relationship between sacred narratives and the development of character. Focusing on the warrior ethos expressed in accounts of the Battle of Karbala, Zargar searches for the place of the martial virtues in modern life and warfare.This book is the first of its kind in taking a virtue ethics approach to the study of Islamic history. It offers an ethical analysis of arguably the most pivotal moment in Islamic history. To do so, it makes use of interdisciplinary methods, especially global philosophy and religious studies, and draws on philosophical concepts spanning from Nietzsche to Iqbal. The book’s clear and engaging prose makes it accessible to readers seeking a profound understanding of intersections between practical philosophy and religious myths.This book targets upper-level undergraduate readers seeking to discover Islamic ethics. It will serve nonspecialists, specialists in Shiʿi Islamic studies, and all those interested in Islamic ethics, virtue ethics, cross-cultural philosophy, Nietzsche studies, military science, and religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Sara Burdorff joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Maternity, Monstrosity and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare (Amsterdam University Press, 2025). This work uses an adaptation of monster theory to rethink the foundations of epic-heroic immortality. Rather than focusing on a specific monster or monsters, the author identifies the "belly-monstrous" as a crucial point of intersection between mothers and warriors in traditional narratives of the Trojan War. Identifying the gestating/digesting belly as the center of the Iliadic world, this groundbreaking approach disrupts androcentric readings of the Iliadic warrior and his ethos, emphasizing the crucial role of female suffering in the generation and preservation of immortal legacy. The author reconsiders ancient Greek depictions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, including Homeric epic and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, and illuminates the cohesive patterning of Shakespeare's "mother-warrior" plays, which place inherited Iliadic-belly-monstrous motifs in conversation with cultural anxieties of late Elizabethan England. With meticulous scholarship and captivating analysis, Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare redefines the relationship between mothers and warriors in the Iliadic-heroic ideal, paving the way for new interpretations of war, grief, and immortal glory in a broad range of literary and cultural contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. Shifting Sovereignties shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered. From these observations, the authors derive a historical conceptualisation which makes change and contingency core aspects of the understanding of sovereignty. Rather than understanding sovereignty as a characteristic of individual states, Mihatsch and Mulligan propose the notion of “sovereignty regimes”: frameworks of legitimation enforced through mutual recognition. These regimes are created and managed by more or less institutionalised structures which embody what the authors call “system sovereignty.” Sovereignty regimes and system sovereignty are, like sovereignty itself, continuously changing and contingent. This process of change forms the core of the book. Shifting Sovereignties thus contributes a practical, historical perspective on a concept which is foundational in political science, international relations, and international law.If purchased from De Gruyter, you can get the book with a 30% discount for €41.96 / £38.15 / $46.19 by ordering with discount code DGBSS30Moritz Mihatsch is Assistant Professor in World History at the University of Cambridge. Michael R. Mulligan is an Assistant Professor in Law at the Euro University of Bahrain. The book has a X/Twitter page, @ShiftingSovs.Benjamin Goh (@BenGohsToSchool) is an independent scholar and humanities educator in Singapore. He holds a MPhil in World History from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. (Hons.) in History from Yale-NUS College. He is a historian of education, and has published on the history of sex education in Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time: Waiting for Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) by Dr. Amanda Lagji reveals the fundamental, constitutive role of the temporal dimensions of waiting in colonial regimes of time, as well as in postcolonial framings of time, history and agency. Drawing from critical time and postcolonial studies alike, this book argues that the temporality of waiting is an essential concept to theorise the relationship between time and power in postcolonial fiction across the long twentieth century - one that illuminates the contradictory temporalities that underlie narratives of progress, modernization and development.The book contributes to the resurgence of interest in time within literary studies by demonstrating that waiting is also integral to postcolonial temporalities, from anticolonial nationalist movements for independence to forms of reconciliation after conflict. In addition to innovative readings of both classic and contemporary postcolonial novels, this study challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time of acceleration and movement by arguing for the centrality of waiting to time-consciousness in the postcolonial world.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world.By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, “too poor to be green.” In Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (Yale UP, 2024), Ramachandra Guha challenges this narrative by revealing a virtually unknown prehistory of the global movement set far outside Europe or America. Long before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and well before climate change, ten remarkable individuals wrote with deep insight about the dangers of environmental abuse from within an Indian context. In strikingly contemporary language, Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukerjee, J. C. Kumarappa, Patrick Geddes, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, Mira, Verrier Elwin, K. M. Munshi, and M. Krishnan wrote about the forest and the wild, soil and water, urbanization and industrialization. Positing the idea of what Guha calls “livelihood environmentalism” in contrast to the “full-stomach environmentalism” of the affluent world, these writers, activists, and scientists played a pioneering role in shaping global conversations about humanity’s relationship with nature. Spanning more than a century of Indian history, and decidedly transnational in reference, this book offers rich resources for considering the threat of climate change today.About the Author:Ramachandra Guha is the author of many books, including India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–1948. Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He lives in Bangalore.About the Host:Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, nor uninterested in its politics of language and caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary of bhakti even in highly technical works of Sanskrit knowledge, and their personal religious commitments featured in a language and genre of writing that deliberately isolated itself from worldly matters. The religion of bhakti bound together the transregional discourse of Sanskrit learning and the local devotional practices of everyday people, though not in a top-down manner. Rather, vernacular ways of being, believing, and belonging in the world could and did reshape the contours of Sanskrit intellectuality.Venkatkrishnan revisits the historiography of the Bhagavata Purana to expand our knowledge of the many different religious and philosophical communities that interpreted and laid claim to the themes of the text. While most associated with the traditions of Vaisnavism, Love in the Time of Scholarship brings to light how the Bhagavata was also studied by Saivas, Saktas, and others on the periphery of the text's history.This is an open access title available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history