G.W.F. Hegel was widely seen as the greatest philosopher of his age. Ever since, his work has shaped debates about issues as varied as religion, aesthetics and metaphysics. His most lasting contribution was his vision of history and politics. In Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton UP, 2023), Richard Bourke returns to Hegel’s original arguments, cl…

Philosophical Presentations of Raising Children: The Grammar of Upbringing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) uses contemporary film to articulate a philosophical account of raising children. It forms part of a revaluation of the parent as a pedagogical figure, which stands in contrast to the instrumental accounts dominant in contemporary ‘parenting’ cultu…

International Development Law: Rule of Law, Human Rights & Global Finance (Springer, 2020) describes how international development works, its shortcomings, its theoretical and practical foundations, along with prescriptions for the future. It provides the reader with new perspectives on the origins of global poverty, identifies legal impediments to…

Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh Universit…

The Great Gatsby is often called the great American novel. Emblematic of an entire era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of illicit desire, grand illusions, and lost dreams is rendered in a lyrical prose that revives a vanished world of glittering parties and vibrant jazz, where money and deceit walk hand in hand. Rich in humor, sharply observant…

Verbal aspect in the Greek language has been a topic of significant debate in recent scholarship. The majority of scholars now believe that an understanding of verbal aspect is even more important than verb tense (past, present, etc.). Yet there still are no alternative accessible textbooks, both in terms of level and price. In the second edition, …

Listen to this interview of Lorenzo Rossi, Research Fellow, University of Camerino, Italy. We talk about his coauthored paper A Technique for Discovering BPMN Collaboration Diagrams (SOSYM 2024). Lorenzo Rossi : "Yeah, this way of structuring the concluding remarks in this paper is a technique we often apply in our research contributions, especiall…

Today I’m speaking with Adam Jortner, Goodwin-Philpott Professor of History at Auburn University. We are discussing his latest book, A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2024). There is a myth that the only religion practiced by the American revolutionaries was Chris…

Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (Oxford UP, 2023) is an account of the economic drivers and outcomes of the Cold War, told through the stories of seven international economists, who were all closely involved in theory and policy in the period 1945-73. For them, the Cold War was a battle of economic…

Dogs are our constant companions: models of loyalty and unconditional love for millions around the world. But these beloved animals are much more than just our pets - and our shared history is far richer and more complex than you might assume. In Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog (Profile Books, 2024), historian and dog lover Chris Pearson revea…

Listen to this interview of Kangfeng Ye, Research Associate, University of York, UK. We talk about his coauthored paper Probabilistic Modelling and Verification Using RoboChart and PRISM (SOSYM 2022). Kangfeng Ye : "In this paper, I have four coauthors, all of them senior researchers. And when we reviewed the manuscript internally, we adopted a str…

Who and what are India’s land mafia? How do they operate, and why have they become so crucial to India’s land market? In this episode, we are joined by Chiara Arnavas for a discussion on the emergence over the past decades of a dynamic Indian land mafia that is centrally involved in moving land around, freeing it up for new uses, and passing it ont…

Shoes are everyday objects but they are loaded with meaning. Shoes and the Georgian Man (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Matthew McCormack reveals how shoes played a powerful role in the wider story of shifts in gender relations in 18th-century Britain. It focuses on the relationship of shoes with the body and its movements, and therefore how what we wear…

After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were hired to work for newly formed government agencies to get the new republic quickly on its feet. But there was an enormous flaw in the plan: no serious vetting system was put in place to keep war crim…

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee's surrender evaporated at the news of Abraham Lincoln's murder. The nation--excepting many white Southerners--found itself consumed with grief, and no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people o…

As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earlies…

Sociologists have had surprisingly little to say about poetry as a topic while sometimes also making grandiose claims that sociology is/should be like poetry. These are the prompts which begin Andrew Smith’s Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures (2024, Palgrave Macmillan). Drawing upon discussions with working class readers of poetry, a…

In Vocabulaire de Laplanche (PUF, 2024), edited by the renowned scholar and analyst, Hélène Tessier, several of the key readers of Jean Laplanche's work propose what is nothing short of a revelation for Laplanche studies. Theirs is a vocabulary that provides a concise and accessible dictionary of key Laplanchian terms, inviting readers of Laplanche…

Christian theologians and students are aware that evangelicals in the Majority World now outnumber those in North America and Europe, and many want to know more about emerging voices in the global church. At the same time, these voices are largely absent from Western evangelical theology. In Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church (Baker G…

Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the gro…

Henry Christophe was born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, and fought to overthrow the British in North America before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue—as Haiti was then called—to end slavery. He rose to power and became their king. In his time, he was popular and famous the world over. So how did he b…

Brian Hioe is a Taipei-based writer, editor, translator, activist, and DJ who is best known for his journalism regarding Taiwan’s social and political landscape. Much of his work appears in New Bloom Magazine, an online magazine that he helped establish in 2014 to cover activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific at large. In this ep…

Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction: A Comparative Study (Routledge, 2025) considers Samuel Beckett's fiction and drama as major aesthetic and thematic influences on the work of Irish authors Eimear McBride, Keith Ridgway, Emma Donoghue, and Kevin Barry in the post-crash period of 2009-2015. Through cross-comparisons between the aesthetics and …

After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India. It’s the latest development in what’s bec…

Gidi Ifergan's The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga (Equinox, 2024) explores the road map of yoga as reflected in the Yogasūtra of Patañjali (third century CE) and the Sāṁkhyakārikā of Iśvarakṛṣṇa (350–450 CE) which leads to the rise of this discerning insight, evading interpretations motivated by naivety on the one hand, and excessive suspicion on th…

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro…

In our captivating interview (pun intended), we celebrate Henry Herz's new book I AM GRAVITY (Tilbury House, April, 2024), which combines lyrical text and fascinating artwork by illustrator Mercè López, and crisscrosses splendidly between science and art, fact and fancy. We also discuss his background in engineering, and how he morphed into a leadi…

What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is immine…