New Books in Western European Studies

Today, I am excited to talk to Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz about the new collection of essays they have edited. Milton’s Moving Bodies (Northwestern University Press, 2024) gathers essays from Erin Webster, John Rumrich, Reginald Wilburn, Stephen Fallon, Achsah Guibbory, and Angelica Duran, among others. As our conversation will indicate, each essay has a unique and compelling approach to each of the title’s prompt “Milton’s” and “Moving” and “Bodies.”Marissa Greenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press, 2015). She has served as a Fellow at UNM’s Division for Equity and Inclusion, where she advocates for academic communities of practice for faculty with disabilities.Rachel Trubowtiz is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as the principal investigator in the NEH-funded “Milton and Mathematics” project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Becoming Modigliani (Rake Press, 2024) is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.; Written by Dr. Henri Colt, an internationally recognized lung specialist, the book examines the artist's legend and Modigliani's creative journey from a medical perspective, from his birth in Livorno, Italy, to his tragic death in a paupers' hospital in Paris at the age of thirty-five, presumably from tuberculous meningitis.Becoming Modigliani sheds light on the young man's chronic illnesses, addictions, and relationships with friends and lovers as he navigated the vibrant yet challenging world of early twentieth-century Bohemian Paris. Beginning with "Modi's" birth in 1884, the narrative is divided into five parts, seamlessly blending biographical elements with medical insights and a critical analysis of Modigliani's work among some of the greatest artists of the time. It also provides thoughtful descriptions of a changing society governed by the impact of infectious diseases, war, and a flourishing of other creative geniuses such as Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Guillaume Apollinaire.With thirty-seven virtually standalone chapters, a preface and epilogue, three appendices, and a rich array of illustrations and references, this biography promises a profound and compassionate exploration of Modigliani's embattled world. In Becoming Modigliani, Dr. Colt's aim is to foster empathy and greater understanding by unraveling the intricate layers of Modigliani's existence. The result is a captivating and deeply researched tale that will resonate with a diverse audience of serious readers, art and medical history enthusiasts, sociologists, and anyone interested in the human spirit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Penguin Press, 2024), he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members.Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist's eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies--like Goebbels, the regime's propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust's chief architect--to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten--like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler's People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions.Nearly a century after Hitler's rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility--and even between pathological evil and rational choice--are never easily drawn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Lottaz and Ottosson explore the intricate relationship between neutral Sweden and Imperial Japan during the latter's 15 years of warfare in Asia and in the Pacific. While Sweden's relationship with European Axis powers took place under the premise of existential security concerns, the case of Japan was altogether different. Japan never was a threat to Sweden, militarily or economically. Nevertheless, Stockholm maintained a close relationship with Tokyo until Japan's surrender in 1945. This book explores the reasons for that and therefore provides a study on the rationale and the value of neutrality in the Long Second World War.Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War: 1931-1945 (Routledge, 2021) is a valuable resource for scholars of the Second World War and of the history of neutrality.Pascal Lottaz is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Waseda University, Japan.Ingemar Ottosson is Associate Professor of History at Lund University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

'All art is propaganda,' wrote George Orwell, 'but not all propaganda is art.' Moving from World War I to the 'War on Terror' and beyond, The Story of British Propaganda Film (Bloomsbury, 2024) shows how the emergence of film as a global media phenomenon reshaped practices of propaganda, while new practices of propaganda in turn reshaped the use of the moving image. It explores classic examples of cinematic propaganda such as The Battle of the Somme (1916), Listen to Britain (1942) and Animal Farm (1954) alongside little-known newsreels, 'telemagazines' and digital media initiatives, in the process challenging our understanding of propaganda itself, and its many diverse manifestations.Richly illustrated with unique material from the BFI National Archive, the book shows how central propaganda is to the development of British film, and how it has filtered our understanding of modern British history, from narratives of decolonisation to the celebration of pop culture and the meanings of the postwar consensus. In a contemporary moment so preoccupied with misinformation, malinformation and disinformation, Dr. Scott Anthony explains why the response to the ubiquity of the propaganda film has often turned out to be the production of ever more propaganda.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/european-studies

It is only in recent years that sociologists and historians of the social sciences have given empire the attention it deserves in histories of the discipline. In this context, George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press) is likely to be a touchstone text in these debates. Providing a new history of the French national discipline inspired by a ‘Neo-Bourdieusian Historical Sociology of Science’, Steinmetz highlights the centrality of ‘colonial sociology’, work centered on and/or created in the French overseas colonies and protectorates to the discipline’s development. The French state, eager to consolidate its empire after World War II, were eager to draw on the expertise of sociologists in pursuing this goal; as Steinmetz shows therefore, during this period, a focus on ‘the colonial’ became central to French sociology to the extent that roughly half the French sociological field could be considered ‘colonial sociologists’. Despite this entanglement with the French state these colonial sociologists became strong critics of imperialism. Alongside the many stories he uncovers Steinmetz explores in depth the case of four such colonial sociologists: Raymond Aron, Jacque Berque, Georges Balandier and Pierre Bourdieu, seeking to show not just the centrality of colonialism to each writer but how their experiences of empire formed their basis for their future work; for example, how Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field can be traced to his experiences in colonial Algeria.In our discussion, which also marks the imminent release of the text in paperback, George takes us through this hugely enlightening text, including reflections on why there may have been some ‘disciplinary amnesia’ in sociology’s unwillingness to confront empire, the relations between sociology and other imperial disciplines, how sociologists from the colonies developed their own work, the lessons from his text about how we should confront colonial sociologists and whether Durkheim had an ‘imperial gaze’.Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and is the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), among other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The trial of former SS lieutenant and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie was France's first trial for crimes against humanity. Known as the "Butcher of Lyon" during the Nazi occupation of that city from 1942 to 1944, Barbie tortured, deported, and murdered thousands of Jews and Resistance fighters. Following a lengthy investigation and the overcoming of numerous legal and other obstacles, the trial began in 1987 and attracted global attention.Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity (U Toronto Press, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of the Barbie trial, including the investigation leading up to it, the legal background to the case, and the hurdles the prosecution had to clear in order to bring Barbie to justice. Richard J. Golsan examines the strategies used by the defence, the prosecution, and the lawyers who represented Barbie's many victims at the trial. The book draws from press coverage, articles, and books about Barbie and the trial published at the time, as well as recently released archival sources and the personal archives of lawyers at the trial.Making the case that, despite the views of its many critics, the Barbie trial was a success in legal, historical, and pedagogical terms, Justice in Lyon details how the trial has had a positive impact on French and international law governing crimes against humanity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conflict on an industrial scale. In Belgium and France, the terrible capacity of modern weaponry destroyed the natural world and exposed previously held truths about military morale and tactics as falsehoods. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered some of the worst conditions that combatants have ever faced. How did they survive? What did it mean to them? How did they perceive these events?Whilst the trenches of the Western Front have come to symbolise the futility and hopelessness of the Great War, in Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Alex Mayhew shows that English infantrymen rarely interpreted their experiences in this way. They sought to survive, navigated the crises that confronted them, and crafted meaningful narratives about their service. Making Sense of the Great War reveals the mechanisms that allowed them to do so.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/european-studies

Is research on antisemitism even necessary in countries with a relatively small Jewish population? Absolutely, as Antisemitism in the North: History and State of Research (de Gruyter, 2019) shows. Compared to other countries, research on antisemitism in the Nordic countries (Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) is marginalized at an institutional and staffing level, especially as far as antisemitism beyond German fascism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust is concerned. Furthermore, compared to scholarship on other prejudices and minority groups, issues concerning Jews and anti-Jewish stereotypes remain relatively underresearched in Scandinavia - even though antisemitic stereotypes have been present and flourishing in the North ever since the arrival of Christianity, and long before the arrival of the first Jewish communities.This volume aims to help bring the study of antisemitism to the fore, from the medieval period to the present day. Contributors from all the Nordic countries describe the status of as well as the challenges and desiderata for the study of antisemitism in their respective countries.Cordelia Heß, University of Greifswald, Germany and Jonathan Adams, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies