New Books in Critical Theory
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network, an academic audio library dedicated to public education. Each episode features scholars discussing their recently published research with another expert in their field. The network offers over 150 channels and more than 28,000 episodes. Listeners can subscribe to a free weekly Substack newsletter and follow on social media for updates.
Episodes
Jeffrey R. Di Leo et al. eds., "Theory as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
What does it mean for theory to be considered as a species of not just literature but world literature? Theory as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), edited by Jeffrey De Leo, offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national categorizing of theory (e.g., French theory), and brings new meanings and challenges to the coming together of theory and l
Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026)
In The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space (Duke University Press, 2026),
Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization
in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern
structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings
of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous,
African, and mixed populat
Natalia Rogach Alexander, "Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey" (Columbia UP, 2025)
John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and
education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us toda
Arlene W. Saxonhouse, "Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists" (U Notre Dame Press, 2026)
Athenian Democracy provides innovative readings of ancient theorists to reveal both the complexity of democracy's achievements and its limits.
In Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (U Notre Dame Press, 2026), noted political scientist Arlene W. Saxonhouse offers fresh and provocative explorations of ancient political theorists, lending new insights about democracy's foun
Joanna Stalnaker, "The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death" (Yale UP, 2025)
What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the
Javier Arbona-Homar, "Explosivity: Following What Remains" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity: Following What Remains (U Minnesota Press, 2025) unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Dr. Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866
Christina Lord, "Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-Ame
Michael Brownstein et al., "Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change" (MIT Press, 2025)
A novel and scientific approach to creating transformative social change—and the surprising ways that each of us can help make a real difference. Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The di
Emmanuel Buzay, "Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2022) sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of
futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information
and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive
narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and,
more broadly,
Lawrence Douglas, "The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice" (Princeton UP, 2026)
The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule ov
On The State of Black Men's Studies and Black Masculinist Thought Scholarship
Wide ranging interview with Dr. Ronald L. Jackson II, Professor and Department Chair of Communication Studies, the University of Miami. Interview explores Dr. Jackson's pioneering scholarship in Black Masculinist Thought, its contribution to Black Studies, its intercultural conversations with Black Feminist Thought, the State of Black Men's Studies and its relationship to Black Women's Studies, it
Gloria Sibson Ayob, "The Concept of Emotional Disorder" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The Concept of Emotional Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2025) is a philosophical and academic exploration of how society determines
whether emotions are considered normal human experiences or emotional disorders. The book examines the concern that some ordinary emotions may be “over pathologized,” meaning they are increasingly treated as medical or psychiatric problems rather than understanda
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, "Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me" (37 Ink, 2026)
The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it’s one that she has taught and observed up close.When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confro
Alex Law, "The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process" (Routledge, 2026)
The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed
for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were
sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it,
for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland
had the same concerns as we do today? Alternatively, does it mean we
should think of sociology as an elite discipline, developed b
Steven Nadler, "Spinoza, Atheist" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his
Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was accused of unspecified “horrifying heresies,” but the precise reasons for his expulsion remain a mystery. When he published his Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, which was condemned as “the most atheistic book ever written,” he began to reveal
Jonatan Leer and Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager, "Food Porn: Food Aesthetics in a Digital Age" (Bristol UP, 2026)
Is food porn a vibrant and democratic new expression of modern food culture or a superficial addition to an image-saturated world? Tracing its origins from the 1970s to today, this timely book examines the evolution of food porn as a desire-inducing aesthetic practice and a visually extravagant food spectacle.
Through discussions on class, gender, sexuality and national identities, Food Porn: Fo
Gary Hoover, "Ladder or Lottery: Economic Promises and the Reality of Who Gets Ahead" (U California Press, 2026)
In Ladder or Lottery: Economic Promises and the Reality of Who Gets Ahead (University of California Press, 2026), Gary Hoover asks the reader a simple question: Is our economy a ladder or a lottery? Are people able to control their position on the economic spectrum by their actions? Some argue that, in our market-based economy, if you play by certain rules and make certain choices, you'll achiev
Michael E. Sawyer, "The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black" (Temple UP, 2026)
In The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black (Temple University Press, 2026), Michael E. Sawyer presents a bold work of speculative theory and philosophy that explores how Black people bring the future into being—and what existence in that future looks like. He considers what people of African descent face and the proper response to the situation. He introduces the idea of Being-As-Black as a response
Laura Tisdall, "We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain" (Yale UP, 2026)
What was life like for young people in twentieth century Britain? In We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain (Yale University Press, 2026), Dr Laura Tisdall, a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University tells the story of this era through the eyes of children and young
people, offering a radical reinterpretation of Britain’s Cold War age.
The book off
Andrea Zarafshon Moore, "Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory" (Fordham UP, 2025)
It is a compulsion of the human race to find a way to memorialize those we have lost and why we have lost them, from a gravestone of a loved one to war monuments that honor thousands who died in battle. In Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory (Fordham UP, 2025), Andrea Zarafshon Moore examines how contemporary music has been used to memorialize three recent crises in the United States:
Petal Kimberly Samuel, "The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet
Nicole Seymour, "Glitter" (Bloombury, 2022)
Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuries-from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory-along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plasti
Thomas Xavier Sarmiento, "The Heartland of US Empire: Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest" (Temple UP, 2026)
Published by Temple University Press in 2026, The Heartland of US Empire: Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest examines Filipinx cultural representations in the Midwest since the early twentieth century. In it, Dr. Thomas Xavier Sarmiento shrewdly considers the impact of American exceptionalism and U.S. imperialism in a region where white, middle-class, heterosexual, and Christian is the
Shyam Ranganathan, "Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
Why have moral philosophers largely ignored colonialism? In Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), Shyam Ranganathan tells the story of moral philosophy and colonialism and reveals the benefits of drawing from a colonized tradition to a create a rigorous logic-based ethics. This is a timely exploration of the the ways in which Western colo
Utku Balaban, "Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers" (U California Press, 2025)
What explains the rise of religious populism in contemporary Turkish
politics and society? How does industrialization help to explain change
and continuity in social and religious life in Muslim majority
countries? In his new book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers (University of California Press, 2025), Utku Balaban examines Turkey’s rapid post-Cold War industria
Hugo Drochon, "Elites and Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2026)
A central paradox of democracies is that they are always ruled by
elites. What can democracy mean in this context? Today, it is often said
that a populist revolt against elites is driving democratic politics
throughout the West. But in Elites and Democracy (Princeton
University Press, 2026), Hugo Drochon argues that democracy is more
accurately and usefully understood as a perpetual struggle
Brett Neilson, "The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World" (Verso, 2024)
At the heart of the fiercest international conflicts is the struggle for the future of globalization.
In the wake of a pandemic that tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict has taken on a new intensity. The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (Verso, 2024) locates
the origins of this development in the turbulent dynamics of the
capitalist world market. Rath
Angharad N. Valdivia and Isabel Molina-Guzmán, "Rebooting Inequality: Critical Takes on Film and Television Remakes" (NYU Press, 2026)
From Ghostbusters to Will & Grace, One Day at a Time to Jurassic Park, the past decade has seen Hollywood reach a new peak in its obsession with reboots, remakes, and revivals. Spearheaded by media giants like Disney and Netflix, these projects promise progress—more diverse casts, “timely” social commentary, and redemptive nostalgia—yet they often reproduce the very inequalities they claim to addr
Benjamin Dalton, "Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity" (Edinburgh UP, 2026)
Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge.
Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film
Drew M. Dalton, "The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
Most of us today would assume that morality and ethics, being value propositions, are questions for inspired leaders, religious creeds, poets—in other words, for the humanities. But what if I told you that we can construct a system of ethics and morality by studying math—more specifically: the laws of thermodynamics? That’s what Professor Drew M Dalton argues in his latest book. Dalton traces a li
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, "The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us" (Liveright Publishing, 2026)
MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter.
Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, in The Mattering Instinct: H
Julia Bowes, "Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism" (Princeton UP, 2026)
“Parental rights” is a rallying cry for today’s American conservatives, signaling opposition to mandatory vaccination and “woke” public school curricula. In Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism (Princeton UP, 2026), Dr. Julia Bowes traces the origins of the modern parental rights movement to the nineteenth century, when the introduction of compulsory sc
Angela Dimitrakaki, "Feminism. Art. Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2026)
Can art change the contemporary world? In Feminism, Art, Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki, a Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the university of Edinburgh, offers a Marxist Feminist perspective on a variety of issues in both society and the cultural sector. Engaging with a huge range of examples, as well as theorising key issues such as work and labour, the long modern, communing p
Alana Lentin, "The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy" (Pluto Books, 2025)
The New Racial Regime begins by interrogating the backlash against critical race theory and explains how the so-called war on woke can be used against educators or to curtail struggles challenging settler colonialism. Alana Lentin grounds her analysis with an engagement of the ideas making up the Black radical tradition and explicates the work of Cedric Robinson in particular. She builds a histori
James Q. Whitman, "Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that there is no natural form of ownership. Whitman dives deep into the long Western history of this transformation in the legal imagination – the transformation from the ownership of humans and other living creatures to the
Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney eds., "Media Rurality" (Duke UP, 2026)
Media Rurality (Duke UP, 2026), edited by Darin Barney and Patrick Brodie, investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike. Edited by Darin Barney and Patrick Brodie, from the boglands of Ireland to data centers in the Oregon countryside to the homemade media systems of rural Tanzani
D. Vance Smith, "Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
A major new look at Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe.Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate with many as cornerstones of European culture. Yet, in Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe (U Chicago Press, 2025), D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Age
Jason R. Young, "The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2026)
In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and curated a highly sanitized view of slavery. They imagined a once and future plantation society that would reestablish them as the proper heirs of the slave past. In the process, they crafted a set of dangerously durable and virulent stereotypes about sl
Mostafa Hussein, "Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab cultures while navigating their evolving identities as settler colonists. Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine (Princeton UP, 2025) challenges the conventional view that Hebrew thinkers were dism
Mapping Out Food and Philosophy
This episode introduces a special issue on food and philosophy. Robert T. Valgenti, of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective, talks with Andrea Borghini about the increasing attention to food within philosophy over the last three decades and shares the inspiration behind their special issue. They discuss how this issue of Gastronomica engages with different disciplines and formats by bringing togeth
Francisco Martínez, "The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia" (Cornell UP, 2025)
How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid answers.
The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia (Cornell UP, 2025) analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relatio
Rugged Individualism
In this special student edition of High Theory, Andrew Bennett, Jo Hoffman, Kai North, and Ally Sullivan tell us about Rugged Individualism, a concept they link to Marxist theory. They made this episode for an assignment in Professor John Linstrom’s course on Theory and Criticism at Centenary College of Louisiana. The students provided the show notes below.
The baby theorist pictured in the fetch
Sarah Jaffe, "From the Ashes: Grief and Transformation in a World on Fire" (Bold Type Books, 2024)
From the author of Work Won't Love You Back, a stirring examination of how collective grief can ignite powerful change. Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change, in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed
169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)
Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system get “invisibilized” with that system’s success, so that seeing money clearly is both harder and more vital. Today, illustrious Princeton historian Peter Brown narrates the … Continue reading "42 Recall
Manuel Barcia, "Pirate Imperialism: Trade, Abolition, and Global Suppression of Maritime Raiding, 1825–1870" (Yale UP, 2026)
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, imperial powers around the world came into direct confrontation with local resistance in the form of maritime raiding. From the Atlantic basin to the western Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, and Southeast Asia and China, imperial powers claimed that progress was being held back by the barbarity and greed of pirates,
Audrey Borowski, "Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant (Princeton UP, 2026) provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribu
Amanda Anderson and Simon During, "Humanities Theory" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Humanities Theory (Oxford UP, 2026) pioneers a new topic: the theory of the humanities. It is an urgent topic right now because the humanities face a suite of forceful new challenges and are in a period of significant change. For these reasons, it has become important to analyse and understand what the humanities are as a whole, beyond disciplinary divisions and yet without resorting to simplistic
Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Political theorist Alisa Kessel (University of Puget Sound) has an important and impressive new book, Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Kessel’s research grew out of her work on questions of consent and how consent is embedded within the social contract structure. Initially the plan for the research was to critique this concept of “rape culture” which had found i
Devika Dutt et al., "Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction" (Polity Press, 2025)
Decolonization has long been debated across the social sciences, but the economics discipline has so far avoided such critical engagement. Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction (Polity, 2024) provides a much-needed intervention.Dutt, Alves, Kesar, and Kvangraven uncover the deeply Eurocentric foundations that shape how economists study the world today. These have rendered the discipline ill-equ
Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era
Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans challenged white supremacy in word and deed in a prolonged struggle to create a better, more just nation.
Join Tyina L. Steptoe, editor of the new two-volume LOA edition of writings from the Jim Crow era, and historians Keisha N. Blain and Manisha Sin
Lisa Siraganian, "The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots" (Verso, 2026)
Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of per-sonhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman.Lisa Siraganian’s The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Tree
Donald Sassoon, "Revolutions: A New History" (Verso Books, 2025)
Revolutions: A New History (Verso Books, 2025) is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civi
Decolonizing the Novum
In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum.
In Zac’s words, the "
Jasper Bernes, "The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising" (Verso Books, 2025)
How might a twenty-first-century revolution against class society succeed?
Communism comes from the future, but its hopes haunt our past. Reading revolutionary history from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising by the light of communist theory, from Marx to C. L. R. James, The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso Books, 2
Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Panini’s Ashtadyayi is one of the most famous works in Sanskrit, a so-called “linguistic machine” that, through its 4,000 words, allows someone to generate words and grammar. Generations of commentators have tried to figure out exactly how to best interpret the work and explain its various contradictions and overlapping instructions.
Then, in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, sai
Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism. She explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates conce
Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood.
Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writ
Andrew Lister, "Justice and Reciprocity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Andrew Lister's Justice and Reciprocity (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls's conception of "justice as fairness." Reciprocity was a central to justice as fairness, but Rawls wasn't explicit about the different forms of reciprocity, nor the diverse roles reciprocity played in his theory. The book's main thesis is threefold. Fi
Amir Saemi, "Morality and Revelation in Islamic Thought and Beyond: A New Problem of Evil" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Amir Saemi’s exciting book Morality and Revelation in Islamic Thought and Beyond: A New Problem of Evil (Oxford UP, 2024) is a fascinating and deeply thought-provoking study that challenges how we think about scripture, morality, and divine authority. Saemi tackles what he calls the “New Problem of Evil,” a divinely prescribed problem of evil, which is the tension between the commands found in sac
Daniel Rachel, "This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich" (Akashic Books, 2026)
Over the last seven decades, some of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theater of the Third Reich. From Keith Moon and Vivian Stanshall kitting themselves out in Nazi uniforms to Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious brandishing swastikas in the pomp of punk, generations of performers have associated themselves in troubling ways with the aesthetics, mass hyster
Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025)
The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech.
Cory Arcangel (b. 1978)—perhaps best known for Super Mario Clouds, the most referenced artistic game hack in art history—became one of the first artists from a new generation of punk DIY–new media geeks to capture the attention of the art w
Pre-Reading
In this episode of High Theory, Milan Terlunen talks to Kim about Pre-Reading. There are many books we will never read and films we will never watch, but it turns out we know quite a bit about them in advance. A concept developed in his work on the plot twist, pre-reading names the epistemic practices by which we approach a text before we read it (if we ever do). The pre-reading environment is sha
Mark Pennington, "Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom by Mark Pennington
This highly original and innovative book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. Divided into two parts the book commences by demonstrating important commonalities between Foucault's
Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.
Emmanuel Ofuasia, "Ìwà: the Process-Relational Dimension to African Metaphysics" (Springer, 2024)
Correction: In the interview, the host mistakenly mentioned that Prof. Ofuasia is teaching the University of Pretoria. In reality, Prof Ofuasia is currently a decoloniality research associate at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Previously, he has taught at the National Open University of Nigeria, FCT Abuja.
Ìwà: the Process-Relational Dimension to African Metaphysics (Springer, 2024) ap
Thomas Hegghammer and Diego Gambetta eds., "Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Time spent and words spent—what does each signal?
Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which one does not belong, or, for a group, to ‘sign’ its action as another group. Mimicry exploits the reputation of the model it mimics to avoid capture (flight), to strike undetected at the enemy (fight),
The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America
Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them most. In The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America (Princeton UP, 2025), Melissa Burch sheds light on one of the most significant forces of social and economic ma
Hsuan L Hsu, "Olfactory Worldmaking" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental hu
David Bather Woods, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods
An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig
Prolepsis
In this episode of High Theory, Gloria Fisk talks to Kim about Prolepsis. Defined by Gerard Genette in the 1970s, prolepsis is a flash forward, the opposite of analepsis, a flash back. Initially the province of high modernism, this rhetorical device has become a well-worn trope with a surprising aptitude for representing violence in our current moment. Fisk shows us how prolepsis dramatizes the wo
Philip C. Almond, "Noah and the Flood in Western Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
In a world beset by climatic emergencies, the continuing resonance of the flood story is perhaps easy to understand. Whether in the tortured alpha male intensity of Russell Crowe’s Noah, in Darren Aronofsky’s eponymous 2014 film, or other recent derivations, the biblical narrative has become a lightning rod for gathering environmental anxieties. However, Philip C. Almond’s masterful exploration of
Becca Voelcker, "Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction" (U California Press, 2025)
Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction considers nonfiction filmmakers and film collectives whose work advances an understanding of land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility. Diving into little-known archives to explore films that resonate across geographies, Becca Voelcker unearths key examples of eco-political counterculture, from farmer-filmmakers in Japan and Mali to a gardener-f
Paul Kohlbry, "Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2026)
The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland.
Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private devel
Piergiorgio Di Giminiani et al. eds., "The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected by historical processes of dispossession, and citizens suffering from environmental harm. Reparations prompt us to face uncomfortable pasts and in so doing, create conditions for imagination of multip
Miriam Ticktin, "Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
In this timely and bold book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (U Chicago Press, 2025), Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Claims to innocence protect migrant children, but often at the expense of their parents; claims to the innocence of the fetus work to punish women. Ticktin shows how innoc
H. S. Jones, "Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect" (Princeton UP, 2025)
James Bryce (1838–1922) was a leading figure in Britain’s Liberal Party and a distinguished historian, a versatile scholar-politician who moved seamlessly between academia and politics. He was, among many other things, a cabinet minister and a popular ambassador, an expert on American politics and on Roman law, an advocate for the Armenian people and an architect of the League of Nations, a world
Alec Ryrie, "The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It" (Reaktion, 2025)
Examining everything from popular novels to politics, an investigation of persistent fascination with Nazis—and where it might take us.
We live in an age where Hitler and the Nazis dominate our cultural imagination, shaping values once defined by religion. Historian Alec Ryrie explores why society remains captivated by this struggle, from history and fiction to modern myths such as Star Wars and
Susannah B. Mintz, "Hypochondria: In Sickness and in Story" (Reaktion, 2026)
Hypochondria: In Sickness and in Story (Reaktion, 2026) proposes a bold reimagining of a frequently dismissed condition. Dr. Susannah B. Mintz reframes health anxiety not as a pathology but as a site of creative potential – exploring hypochondria as a form of communication, a reorientation to time, a convergence of personal and communal identity, a declaration of bodymind needs and an embrace of a
Tristan J. Rogers, "Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction" (Routledge, 2025)
In Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2025), Tristan J. Rogers argues that philosophical conservatism is a coherent and compelling set of historically rooted ideas about conserving and promoting the human good. Part I, “Conservatism Past,” presents a history of conservative ideas, exploring themes, such as the search for wisdom, the limits of philosophy, re
Wendy Brown, "States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity" (Princeton UP, 2025)
A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2025) explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditi
Recommended
12 Minute Meditation
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson, Book Summary, Podcast, English
1440 Explores
1490 Doom - Lore Series Podcast
15 MINS OF FAME
15 Minute Mysteries: The Deep Dive
15 minutes de grâce et de vérité
15 Minutes of Infamy
15 Minutes with Jesus: Christian Meditation, Guided Prayer, Bible Study, Emotional Healing, Devotional, Hear God’s Voice
180Podcast.
1856 Podcast-YMCA of South Hampton Roads
1984
