New Books in Western European Studies

When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. In An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (NYU Press, 2021), Dr. Kate Mulry examines ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, showing how agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited.In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. This book investigates how Restoration officials endeavoured to recover control and counteract any lingering questions about the king’s rightful authority after this long exile by reforming and cultivating environments on both sides of the Atlantic.An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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/european-studies

What is the hidden history of performers of colour in in British theatre? In British Black and Asian Shakespeareans: Integrating Shakespeare, 1966–2018 (Arden Shakespeare, 2022), Jami Rogers, an honorary fellow at Department of English at University of Warwick, examines this question with one of the most central parts of British theatre and culture- performances of Shakespeare. The book tells a story of discrimination and barriers to success, whilst celebrating career triumphs and demonstrating the significance of actors, directors, and theatre companies. The book uses archival material including theatre criticism, a new database of performances and performers, and interviews with a range of the British Black and Asian Shakespearian greats. The book will be essential reading across the arts and humanities, as well as for social scientists, and anyone interested in understanding British arts and culture.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

With the war in Ukraine showing no signs of stopping anytime soon, it was thought a worthwhile idea to have an informed discussion with four expert historians of 19th and 20th century European and Eastern European, diplomatic and military history. As you can readily see from the below biographies, this is a superior and award-winning panel. Please listen and enjoy.University of Exeter, Professor of History Jeremy Black discusses various aspects of the subject at length with Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society in this new episode of 'Arguing History: Slavery in World History'. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred & fifty books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.”Professor Thomas Otte teaches Diplomatic, International and Military History. He is the author or editor of some fifteen books, including, most recently, the award-winning July Crisis: How the World Descended into War, Summer 1914 (CUP, 2014); he has also has published numerous essays in edited collections and articles in leading journals, including the English Historical Review, Historical Journal, and History. Professor Otte is widely regarded as being one of the leading diplomatic historians of his generation.Professor David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies, joined the Strategy and Policy Department in 2015. He received a B.A. from Wabash College and a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University. His book “Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union” (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published “A Military History of Russia” (2006) and “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (2015). He edited “The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945” (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.Alex Watson's latest book is The Fortress. The Great Siege of Przemysl (London: Allen Lane, 2019). This is the story of the First World War’s longest siege, and of the opening of the brutal tragedy which befell East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It follows a ragtag Habsburg garrison of old soldiers as they desperately defend Central Europe from Russian invasion, and recounts the vicious fighting, starvation and anti-Semitic ethnic cleansing which began in the region already in 1914. The book won a Society for Military History 2021 Distinguished Book Award and was a BBC History Magazine and Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’. The Times newspaper praised it as ‘a masterpiece’. ‘Vividly written and well researched …it deserves to become a classic of military history.’ His two prior books were also award winners.Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The theme of exile in Irish writing often calls to mind Joyce or Beckett, but rarely does it conjure up other writers or literary networks, particularly those of the often-overlooked literary history of the nineteen thirties. Goldstone’s original new study, Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art, Exile and War (Routledge, 2020) takes up the theme of art and exile by focusing on four Irish writers—Leslie Daiken, Charles Donnelly, Ewart Milne and Michael Sayers—and brings to light important local and global aspects of the Popular Front cultural movement. Tracing literary networks from interwar London to the Spanish Civil War and the USSR Goldstone skillfully exposes the ways that these lives overlapped and entwined, revealing the relationships between these writers and George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Nancy Cunard, William Carlos Williams, and others, thus illuminating internationalist aspects of a Leftist cultural history. This book is commendable for its discussion of how Irish literary women on the left defied marginalization, and in this way provides a framework for further study on the topic.In its examination of this neglected period of Irish literary history Irish Writers and the Thirties re-imagines Irish writing of the mid-twentieth century and will prove of great interest to scholars and students of cultural history, Irish studies, and Jewish studies, as well as to more general readers interested in the thirties.Bridget English is a scholar of Irish literature and culture, modernism, and health humanities, based at the University of Illinois Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Seminar at the Newberry Library and is the Literature Representative for the American Conference for Irish Studies. Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/bridgetrenglis2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Art historian Catherine McCormack challenges how culture teaches us to see and value women, their bodies, and their lives.Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster—women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them. In Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies (Norton, 2021), Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumptions behind these stereotypes whether writ large or subtly hidden. She ranges through Western art—think Titian, Botticelli, and Millais—and the image-saturated world of fashion photographs, advertisements, and social media, and boldly counters these depictions by turning to the work of women artists like Morisot, Ringgold, Lacy, and Walker, who offer alternative images for exploring women’s identity, sexuality, race, and power in more complex ways.Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion.What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.This interview was conduced by Alison Renna, a PhD candidate studying the history of ideas at Yale University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time.The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self.Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces," concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity.According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

What is the future for the House of Commons? In Held in Contempt: What’s Wrong with the House of Commons? Hannah White, Deputy Director of the Institute for Government, sets out a critique of the way a key institution at the heart of British democracy is failing to deliver for citizens, staff, and Members alike. Set against the backdrop of Brexit, the Coronavirus pandemic, and various institutional scandals, the book details how the Commons fails in its role of holding government to account; is unrepresentative of the population as a whole; is overly complicated and arcane; and is housed in a building that is no longer fit for purpose. At the heart of the book is a challenge to MPs to reform both their own culture and the Commons itself. Ultimately, the book is a defence of the high standards that the Commons should aspire to and has a range of recommendations to make this happen. It is essential reading for every British citizen, and anyone interested in politics.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Carolyn Eichner's new book, The Paris Commune: A Brief History (Rutgers University Press, 2022) was published on March 18th, the anniversary of the eruption of Paris Commune of 1871. In this accessible history of the 72-day uprising during which the working-class people of Paris established their own government; experimented with forms of radical democracy and social change; and resisted the forces of the French state and military, Eichner explores the Commune within the context of nineteenth-century political, economic, and cultural history in France and beyond its borders. Structured in three parts/chapters that take up the metaphorics of illumination, fluorescence, and explosion, the book follows the lives, ideas, and actions of Communards who sought to bring about a new society, and were ultimately crushed in their efforts. After two and a half months, the French government under the leadership of Adolphe Thiers crushed the Commune during the "Bloody Week" of May 21st-28th. Thousands of Communards met their violent ends in the streets of Paris while others were arrested, tried,  and deported.The book is short and rich, clear and dramatic, an excellent resource for students, readers academic and non, anyone interested in a smart, clear introduction to these events and figures with such mythological status in the histories of popular resistance and revolution. It is also a fascinating account for those more familiar with the Commune. Attentive to the role of women and gender throughout, and interested in understanding the Commune's achievements as well as its limitations, Eichner's account revisits some of the long-standing debates about the Commune's course, and its legacies. Bonne lecture!Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Britain in the 1840s should have been, observes Simon Heffer, a time of great social improvement. Instead it was a country that was beset by poverty, unrest, assassination attempts on young Queen Victoria and her Prime Minister, and fears of revolution. Yet just forty years later, it was as if none of that had ever happened. It had become a prosperous and progressive nation, transformed by advances not only in industrialization, but also in politics, science, religion, and education. That Britain had become such a society was not an accident, but the result of intelligent and directed purposeThe story of that purpose, and what it wrought, is the subject of Heffer’s book High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain (Pegasus Books, 2022). It is an investigation not simply of political, social, or cultural change, but of a change of mind—by which I mean not merely changing ideas, like changing clothes from season to season, but of changing the way things are seenSimon Heffer is an eminent British journalist, essayist, historian, and author of numerous books, including lives of the 19th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle and 20th century politician Enoch Powell, and a series of histories of Britain of which High Minds is the first.For Further Investigation In our wide-ranging conversation we touched on topics covered in previous episodes of the podcast. If you haven’t already, then listen to Jonathan Rose talk about the intellectual life of the British working class; or Will Hay describe the importance of an obscure Prime Minister. High Minds was published in 2013 in Britain, but is only now being published in the United States by Pegasus Books. It has been followed by The Age of Decadence–A History of Britain: 1880-1914, which was confusingly published in the United States before High Minds. Staring at God: Britain in the Great War has not been published in America; you’ll need to order it from Britain along with the good Cadbury’s chocolate they keep for themselves. The final volume in the series, now being written, will end the story in 1939. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the excellent podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies