Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Dr. Hitz’s own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought.Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Dr. Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity. Our guest is: Dr. Zena Hitz, who is a Tutor in the great books program at St. John's College. She has a PhD in ancient philosophy from Princeton University and studies and teaches across the liberal arts. She is the founder of the Catherine Project, and the author of Lost in Thought. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor and grad student coach. She is the founder of the Academic Life project including this podcast, and writes the Academic Life Newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.Com. Playlist for listeners: Once Upon A Tome Skills for Scholars: How Can Mindfulness Help? The Well-Gardened Mind Community Building and How We Show Up The Good-Enough Life Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Already There Tackling Burnout How To Human Common-Sense Ideas For Diversity and Inclusion Hope for the Humanities PhD Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (Princeton UP, 2020) delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer’s evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments.Athena Aktipis goes back billions of years to explore when unicellular forms became multicellular organisms. Within these bodies of cooperating cells, cheating ones arose, overusing resources and replicating out of control, giving rise to cancer. Aktipis illustrates how evolution has paved the way for cancer’s ubiquity, and why it will exist as long as multicellular life does. Even so, she argues, this doesn’t mean we should give up on treating cancer—in fact, evolutionary approaches offer new and promising options for the disease’s prevention and treatments that aim at long-term management rather than simple eradication. Looking across species—from sponges and cacti to dogs and elephants—we are discovering new mechanisms of tumor suppression and the many ways that multicellular life-forms have evolved to keep cancer under control. By accepting that cancer is a part of our biological past, present, and future—and that we cannot win a war against evolution—treatments can become smarter, more strategic, and more humane.Unifying the latest research from biology, ecology, medicine, and social science, The Cheating Cell challenges us to rethink cancer’s fundamental nature and our relationship to it.Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

David D. Hall, Professor Emeritus of American Religious History at Harvard, dives deep into the fascinating world of Puritanism. He discusses the theological debates that fueled Elizabethan nonconformity and the rise of Presbyterianism in Scotland. Hall explores how Puritan practical divinity emphasized emotional piety and conversion narratives, while also addressing the tensions between strict divine laws and commitments to church participation. He highlights Puritan legacies in 19th-century moral reform and reflects on their lasting impact in America.

Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries—how we build them and how we should expand them.Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves—often referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition—needs to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library. William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives. It’s a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers.Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and some began to spend their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions and their failures as the result of blind economic forces.A wonderful work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.Margaret Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her many books include The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans and The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City

In this engaging discussion, Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, dives into the pitfalls of AI hype. He addresses how AI chatbots often 'hallucinate' and the rampant misinformation in AI marketing. Narayanan distinguishes between generative and predictive AI and critiques their applications in fields like hiring and education. The conversation also evaluates extreme views on AI's future, urging a balanced understanding to avoid policy missteps.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a classics professor at Princeton and author of "Classicism and Other Phobias," explores the intersection of classicism and racial politics. He argues that traditional views of classicism often marginalize Black expressions and suggests a reimagined classicism rooted in insurgence and emancipation. Delving into the histories of ancient Greece and Rome, he examines their ties to colonialism and their impact on Black narratives. Featuring insights on Black classicism and art, Padilla Peralta calls for a fundamental shift in understanding classicism.

In Istanbul, there is a mosque on every hill. Cruising along the Bosphorus, either for pleasure, or like the majority of Istanbul’s denizens, for transit, you cannot help but notice that the city’s landscape would be dramatically altered without the mosques of the city. In Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019), Ünver Rüstem takes a stab of a slice of that history, arguing that we should see the eighteenth-century Baroque period in Ottoman mosque architecture as innovative and not derivative in how Ottoman mosque architecture integrated Baroque elements. By doing so, he pushes back effectively against notions of Ottoman decline and demonstrates that such architecture, praised in the contemporary writings of both Ottoman and Western viewers, successfully rebranded the Ottoman capital for a changing world. He also draws our eyes to the complex social process by which mosque design develops, bringing in a cast of characters that includes non-Muslims as much as non-Muslims. On this New Books interview, we walk you through the book, Rüstem’s process, what Baroque means in different contexts and mosque architecture in Istanbul today.Ünver Rüstem is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

In the increasingly competitive world of academia, simply mastering your discipline is no longer enough to guarantee career success or personal fulfillment. The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond (Princeton UP, 2025) challenges scholars at all stages—from doctoral students to tenured professors—to break free from conventional academic pathways by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset. What opportunities can you create based on who you are, what you know, and who you know?Drawing on her experiences in higher education, start-ups, and management consulting, as well as interviews with a range of academics and entrepreneurs, Professor Ilana Horwitz provides a road map for those stifled by traditional academic norms and expectations. This book calls on scholars to create ideas—not just consume them. It offers strategies to thrive in academia with limited resources and in the face of uncertainty. Embracing an entrepreneurial mindset entails viewing yourself as a knowledge producer, enhancing collaboration, creatively identifying resources, and effectively sharing your ideas. Dr. Horwitz empowers all scholars—particularly women and first-generation, low-income, and BIPOC individuals—to see themselves as proactive agents in their educational and career trajectories, despite structural constraints, unclear expectations, or unresponsive advisors. With actionable advice, real-world applications, and inspiring success stories, this guide is vital for anyone aspiring to excel within and beyond the ivory tower. Our guest is: Dr. Ilana M. Horwitz, who is assistant professor of Jewish studies and sociology and the Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University. She is also the author of God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She works as grad student coach and developmental editor for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. She writes the Academic Life newsletter, now available at christinagessler.substack.com. Playlist: The Connected PhD Part One Leading from the Margins My What-If Year: Internships As Career Exploration Hope for the Humanities PhD Making a "Junk Drawer" CV Lessons in Launching An Online Conference Before And After The Book Deal Make Your Art No Matter What Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by sharing episodes, and by following the Academic Life newsletter at christinagessler.substack.com. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Audrey Truschke, a distinguished professor of South Asian history, delves into the complexities of 5,000 years of Indian history. She highlights the rich tapestry of cultural exchanges across the subcontinent, from early migrations to the influence of Buddhism and Ashoka. The discussion covers significant events like the Partition, the evolution of Hinduism, Buddhism, and the formation of the South Asian diaspora. Truschke also critiques common historical narratives and emphasizes the diverse voices that shape India's past and present.