New Books in Western European Studies

The life of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country’s politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents—including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career—to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era.Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya’s likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery—from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist’s personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya’s late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the “black” paintings.A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist (Princeton UP, 2020) is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

I think this is the fifth time I've interviewed John K. Roth for the podcast (and the second for Carol Rittner). He has always been relentlessly realistic about the challenges, intellectual, practical and emotional, that Holocaust Studies poses.  Advancing Holocaust Studies (Routledge, 2020), however, reads differently. Published in a world wracked by political and ideological conflict, the essays here struggle to reconcile the time, energy and devotion Holocaust scholars have poured into their subject with the seeming failure to change real world behavior and attitudes. The essays are personal and honest. They ask hard questions about the value of Holocaust Studies about whether or how it needs to change to confront modern challenges.Rittner and Roth have done their usual wonderful job in finding and publishing an important group of essays. It says nothing about their work to suggest that the essays provide more questions than answers.   Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

As Donald Trump's presidency draws to a close, his opponents give thanks that he never developed a strategy or learned to use his powers and agencies efficiently. If he had, like Hungary's four-term prime minister Viktor Orbán, Trump could have created an "illiberal democracy" - a country with democratic trappings but with a charismatic, nationalist leader in charge of a hegemonic party, politicised institutions, and facing a divided and hobbled opposition.“For two decades after the fall of socialism, Hungary was heralded as a champion of liberal reforms”, says Gábor Scheiring. "The country turned from a laboratory of neoliberalism into a laboratory of illiberalism”.Orbán is a skilful politician, he argues, but his success is built on fundamental economic and political mistakes made by governments of the left in the early days of the transition. The prime minister and his party used this environment to launch a "pre-meditated, systematic and aggressive” campaign to court national rather than transnational capital and replace the socialists as the representatives of "left-behind" working class communities. This is a formidable coalition.Today I talked to Scheiring about his book The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary (Palgrave, 2020). Scheiring is a sociologist and economist, a former Green member of the Hungarian parliament from 2010-2014, and is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at Bocconi University in Milan. *His own book recommendation is Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Princeton University Press, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Albert Camus, one of the most famous French philosophers and novelists, has a diverse fan base. British alternative rockers The Cure sang about The Stranger in their first big hit, “Killing an Arab”, released in 1980. George W. Bush announced that the novel was his summer reading in 2006 (considering the book’s central plot point and what he had unleashed in Iraq, this raised a few eyebrows). In 2009 there was a call to move his remains to the Pantheon. Camus’ concept of the “absurd” continues to resonant with those alienated by late capitalism and The Myth of Sisyphus is regularly invoked by faculty members dealing with university bureaucracies. But few critics properly place Camus and his work in the context of French colonialism. Born in Algeria to an impoverished pied-noir family, he was quite the outsider (dare we say “étranger”?) to the privileged world of French letters. Once a member of the Communist Party, he became a staunch critic of Stalinism and groupthink. When Camus dared to break ranks with the orthodoxy of the Latin Quarter, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Francis Jeanson, and others turned on him. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, his reputation was further tarnished as he struggled to come to terms with the Algerian war for independence. When he died an “absurd” death in a car accident in 1960, his closest associates suppressed the pro-colonial manuscript found in the wreckage. For several decades, Camus was not a central figure in French letters. Yet, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of Sartre’s influence there was a Camus revival. Now he has the posthumous stature of a fallen rock-star.Camus and his legacy are obviously complex. Fortunately, Oliver Gloag’s Albert Camus: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford UP, 2020) offer a concise yet nuanced account of his life and his work. Gloag excels at making Camus’ complicated philosophy accessible, and he successfully contextualizes the author as a settler colonist torn between justice and love of the country of his birth.Oliver Gloag is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. He was educated at Columbia University, Tulane University (J.D.), and Duke University (Ph.D.); he specializes in francophone and postcolonial literature, twentieth century French literature, and cultural history. He has published on Sartre and Camus and contributed to The Sartrean Mind. He is the author of Oublier Camus, a forthcoming book on the ideological and political claiming of Camus in contemporary France. His essay “The Colonial Contradictions of Albert Camus” on Camus were featured in Jacobin.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Is Britain a part of Europe? The British have been ambivalent on this question since the Second World War, when the Western European nations sought to prevent the return of fascism by creating strong international ties throughout the Continent. Britain reluctantly joined the Common Market, the European Community, and ultimately the European Union, but its decades of membership never quite led it to accept a European orientation. In the view of the distinguished political scientist Vernon Bogdanor, the question of Britain’s relationship to Europe is rooted in “the prime conflict of our time,” the dispute between the competing faiths of liberalism and nationalism. Britain and Europe in a Troubled World (Yale UP, 2019) provides concise, expertly guided tour provides the essential background to the struggle over Brexit.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

We are here today with Jesse Spohnholz, Professor of History and Director of The Roots of Contemporary Issues World History Program at Washington State University in beautiful Pullman, Washington, to talk about his penultimate book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition first published n 2017 by Cambridge University Press and out 2020 in paperback.The Convent of Wesel was long believed to be a clandestine assembly of Protestant leaders in 1568 that helped establish foundations for Reformed churches in the Dutch Republic and northwest Germany. However, Jesse Spohnholz shows that that event did not happen, but was an idea created and perpetuated by historians and record keepers since the 1600s. Appropriately, this book offers not just a fascinating snapshot of Reformation history but a reflection on the nature of historical inquiry itself. The Convent of Wesel begins with a detailed microhistory that unravels the mystery and then traces knowledge about the document at the centre of the mystery over four and a half centuries, through historical writing, archiving and centenary commemorations. Spohnholz reveals how historians can inadvertently align themselves with protagonists in the debates they study and thus replicate errors that conceal the dynamic complexity of the past.The conversation covers the book, of course, with a good discussion about how history is done.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The movement of borders and people was a remarkably common experience for mid-twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europeans. Such was the case along the border between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where territory changed hands in 1938 and again in 1945. During the intervening period and beyond, residents of the borderland were caught in a nearly continuous onslaught of ethnic cleansing - expulsion of Czech and Slovak "colonists," Jewish deportations during the Holocaust, and postwar population exchanges - that was meant to reshape the territory first in the desired image of the Hungarian state and later on in that of Czechoslovakia.Leslie Waters's book Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Forced Migration in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester Press, 2020) examines the impact of border changes and migrations on this region between 1938 and 1948. It investigates the everyday consequences of geopolitical events that are well-known from the perspective of international and national histories, but does so explicitly in the context of the borderland. Making skillful use of state and local archival sources in Hungary and Slovakia, author Leslie Waters illuminates the catastrophic effects of state action - including sweeping wealth redistribution and the expulsion of those perceived as enemies of the state - on individuals. This engagingly written and far-reaching work will be invaluable to scholars of the Holocaust and of East Central Europe as well as to those who study forced migration, population exchange, and inter-ethnic relations.Leslie Waters is assistant professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. 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 coronavirus pandemic, Modern Monetary Theory met its moment. A sudden and massive loss of output globally was met with an unprecedented response by governments and central banks and at least some official regret about excessive fiscal austerity after the 2008-09 crisis.Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy found a ready audience and remains in the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller List six months after publication. Yet, one criticism of her book and of MMT generally is that its proponents, examples and policy proposals are overwhelmingly American and built on assumptions about having a sovereign and dominant global currency. Dirk Ehnts, a leading MMT proponent, seeks to address this criticism in  Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2016). In 2020, he published an updated edition in German as Money and Credit: A European Perspective (Metropolis, 2020).Dirk Ehnts earned his doctorate at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg and has worked as an academic economist at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, the Free University Berlin, Bard College Berlin, the Technical University of Chemnitz and the University of Flensburg. In 2019, he organised the first European MMT conference and has scheduled the second for September 2021.*His own book recommendation is Reclaiming the State by William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi (Pluto Press, 2017).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso (University of Delaware Press, 2019), Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante's Divine Comedy, Luigi Pulci's Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies. Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Today’s interview on New Books in History is with Dr. Marta Vicente, Professor of History at the University of Kansas to talk about her 2017 Cambridge University Press release, Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain.Eighteenth-century debates continue to set the terms of modern-day discussions on how ‘nature and nurture’ shape sex and gender. Current dialogs – from the tension between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ bodies, to how nature and society shape sexual difference – date back to the early modern period. Debating Sex and Gender is an innovative study of the creation of a two=sex modern of human sexuality based on different genitalia within Spain, reflecting the enlightened quest to promote social reproduction and stability. Drawing on primary sources such as medical treatises and legal literature, Vicente traces the lives of individuals whose ambiguous sex and gender made them examples for physicians, legislators, and educators for how nature, family upbringing, education, and the social environment shaped an individual’s sex. This book brings together insights form the histories of sexuality, medicine, and the law to shed new light on this timely and important field of study.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies