New Work In Intellectual History

In this episode, Derek van Voorst speaks with Dr Edward Jones Corredera, who is senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and assistant lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Madrid). The discussion focused on his recent book, Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (OUP, 2024), although it also covered topics such as the theoretical framework of 'odious debt', historical debt, future developments of debtor nations, and so forth.

Roots and Branches: First episode out now. Intellectual Historian Richard Whatmore (University of St Andrews) explains why the Enlightenment, 18th century republicanism and the history of free states matter for today’s global politics. Subscribe to Roots and Branches on Spotify or iTunes by visiting the Episode Website below.

Get ready for Roots and Branches, the new ideas podcast from the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews. In this introductory episode, host Selma Sondern explains what Intellectual History is, why it matters, and what to expect when Roots and Branches launches on 1 July 2025 with Prof Richard Whatmore. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and iTunes by visiting the Episode Website below.

Davide Cadeddu, a Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Milan, dives into the significance of classic texts in historiography as mirrors of their times and tools for modern insight. He discusses how historiographical classics evolve, reflecting community identities and fostering cross-cultural dialogue. Cadeddu contrasts views on imperial history, particularly between Italian and British perspectives, while sharing his academic experiences across Europe. He also touches on the influence of E. H. Carr and the challenges of integrating diverse scholarship.

The dark history of eugenic thought in Germany from the nineteenth century to today―and the courageous counter-voices. In this episode, Robin Mills speaks with Dagmar Herzog about her new book The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2024). Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilisations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.

In this episode, Robin Mills speaks with Elad Carmel about his new book Anticlerical Legacies - The deistic reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670–1740 (Manchester University Press, 2024). The conversation touches upon a wide range of topics related to 17th-century religion, reception history, and deism.

In this episode, Seungeun Lee speaks with Isaac Nakhimovsky about his new book The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation  (Princeton, 2024). The book challenges the prevailing view of the Holy Alliance as a reactionary and illusory endeavor, as well as the idea of a linear progression of liberalism in opposition to such deviations. Nakhimovsky reconstructs the discourse around a liberal vision of a European federation, where reformers and patriots from smaller European states, as well as abolitionists beyond Europe, looked to Russia as the potential guarantor of a peaceful order.

In this interview, Ross Carroll (Dublin City University) talks about what's new and interesting in scholarship on Edmund Burke, following writing a new introduction to the great Irish thinker for Polity's Classic Thinkers series.

Mark Garnett, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Lancaster University, has a bone to pick with commentators on the British conservative tradition and the British Conservative Party. In this wide-ranging conversation, he discusses how so often what the Party’s ideology is taken being the same thing as conservative political thought. But for most of its history, the Conservative Party has been anything other than conservative. Instead, we might understand the Party’s changing ideology in terms of the overlapping and competing perspectives of liberalism, nationalism and pragmatism. And we might also think again about what ‘conservative political thought’ actually has been in England the past two centuries.

In this bonus episode, we bring an interview with Professor Peter Gordon about the philosopher and social theorist Theodor Adorno (1903 - 1969). The interview is part of a new podcast series on German Intellectual History entitled Zeitgeist und Geschichte. Discover more episodes here and subscribe on iTunes or Spotify.