Guest host John Raimo interviews Sebastian Veg, professor of the intellectual history of twentieth-century China at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Science (EHESS) in Paris, about his book, Minjian: The Rise of China's Grassroots Intellectuals (Columbia University Press 2019, and paperback 2021).

China's Grassroots Intellectuals: John Raimo interviews Sebastian Veg

In Theory co-host Simon Brown interviews William H. Sewell Jr., the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago, about his new book, Commercial Capitalism and Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France(University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Capitalism and Civic Equality: Simon Brown interviews William H. Sewell Jr.

John Raimo, one of the founding editor of the JHI Blog and PhD candidate at New York University, interviews Christopher S. Celenza, James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History in Classics at Johns Hopkins University about his new book, "The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400-1800"(Cambridge University Press, 2021).

The Italian Renaissance and Modern Humanities: John Raimo interviews Christopher S. Celenza

In Theory editor Kristin Engelhardt interviews Professor Edward Tyerman, Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, about his book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021).

Internationalist aesthetics: Kristin Engelhardt interviews Edward Tyerman

In Theory editor Kristin Engelhardt interviews Dannelle Gutarra Cordero,  Lecturer in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University, about her book, She is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World(Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Intellectual History of Racialized Emotions: Kristin Engelhardt interviews Dannelle Gutarra Cordero

In Theory co-host Disha Karnad Jani interviews Judith Surkis, Professor of History at Rutgers School of Art and Sciences, about her book, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930(Cornell University Press, 2019).

Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria - Disha Karnad Jani interviews Judith Surkis

In Theory editor Disha Karnad Jani interviews Divya Cherian, Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University about her book, Merchants of Virtue. Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California University Press, 2022).

Merchants of Virtue: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Divya Cherian

Historian and In Theory editor Disha Karnad Jani interviews Anjali Arondekar, Professor of Feminist Studies at California University of California, Santa Cruz and Founding Director of the Center for South Asian Studies about her recently published book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023).

Abundance: Sexuality’s History: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Anjali Arondekar

Historian and In Theory editor Disha Karnad Jani interviews Charisse Burden-Stelly about her new book, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023). The book explores how related panics about Black political power and communism in the early 20th century drove the US government’s attempts at repression of anti-capitalist and anti-racist movements.

Black Scare/Red Scare: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Charisse Burden-Stelly

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Tehila Sasson, Assistant Professor of Britain and the World in the Department of History at Emory University. In this interview, the author discusses her new book The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024). Sasson shows how British nonprofits sought to create an ethical capitalism in the decades immediately after the Second World War and traces how many of the core concepts and practices of neoliberalism grew out of experiments from the left-liberal nonprofit sector in the era of decolonization.

The Solidarity Economy: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Tehila Sasson

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, about her new book "Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution" (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Daut draws out the influential concepts transformed by 18th and 19th century Haitian thinkers writing during and in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. She shows the simultaneous universality and specificity of the Haitian revolutionary moment for the development of enduring ideas about freedom, indigeneity, revolution, and slavery.

Awakening the Ashes: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Marlene Daut

Luke Wilkinson interviews Henrike Lähnemann, Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the University of Oxford, to discuss her and Eva Schlotheuber's new book 'The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents' (Open Book Publishers, 2024). They discuss the ideas that circulated through the sounds and spaces of medieval German convents.

The Life of Nuns: Luke Wilkinson interviews Henrike Lähnemann

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Camille Robcis, Professor of History and French at Columbia University about her recent book Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Robcis traces how the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, together with his colleagues and patients in the village of St-Alban-sur-Limagnole, transformed the practice and theory of psychiatry during and after the Second World War. They did this by turning towards the institution of the hospital itself, and
considering how psychiatric care could be rooted in an ethical and political critique of social conditions. This resulted in a new movement called institutional psychotherapy, which Robcis traces between Spain, France, and Algeria, and in the work and legacies of influential thinkers such as Jean Oury, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Disalienation: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Camille Robcis

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Umut Özsu, Professor in the Department of Law and Legalities at Carleton University, about his book Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960-82 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book shows how jurists from the Third World transformed international law during post-1945 decolonization, and traces the legal dimensions of ideas of territorial sovereignty, resource extraction, justice, and freedom.

Completing Humanity: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Umut Özsu

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Robert Darnton, Professor Emeritus and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard University, about his recent book, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 (W. W. Norton, 2024), also published in French translation: L'humeur révolutionnaire: Paris, 1748-1789 (trans. Hélène Borraz, Gallimard, 2024). 

Darnton traces how the antecedents to revolution circulated among the Parisian public in the decades before the storming of the Bastille, through their everyday oppositions to the rising price of bread, the overreaches of the monarchy, and the policing of poor neighborhoods. Through their growing sense that the powerful in their society were not governing as they should, ordinary people in Paris began to acquire a shared feeling of discontent, and showed this through many forms of public performance and protest. Darnton tracks this as the development of a "revolutionary temper" in Paris, one which made the population ready to change their world in a matter of decades.

The Revolutionary Temper: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Robert Darnton

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Marc-William Palen, Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024). 

Palen begins his story in the 1840s, and shows how over a century of left-wing activists, politicians, and scholars imagined ways to transform the world through free-trade economics. People with distinct and overlapping politics populate this world, including anti-colonial nationalists, liberals, socialists, Christians, and feminists. Through an analysis of the evolving discussions of the meaning of free trade and protectionism for war and peace across British, US, French, Dutch, Japanese, and other empires, Palen traces the 19th century left-wing origins of free-trade economics and the contest with its right-wing counterparts to the establishment of the post-1945 economic order.

Pax Economica: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Marc-William Palen

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, Oxford about her new book, "Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War" (Basic Books, 2025), also available in German as "Für die Freiheit: Der Bauernkrieg 1525" (trans. Holger Fock and Sabine Müller, S. Fischer Verlage, 2024). In this new history of this massive event, Roper closely examines the political, religious, and intellectual worlds of the thousands of peasants who rose up and took over vast lands in what is now Germany, in one of the most decisive moments in the history of the Reformation, and (as we discuss) for the intellectual history of everything from revolution to ecology to brotherhood. By reading the peasants' movements, physical landscape, complaints, dreams, desires, and visions for the future, Roper offers us an account of how, for a few months in the middle of the sixteenth century, the poorest people in Germany almost overturned the social order of their world. 

Summer of Fire and Blood: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Lyndal Roper

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Asheesh Kapur Siddique, assistant professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, about his recent book, "The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World" (Yale University Press, 2024). 

Siddique examines how early modern British administrators ushered in a new kind of information state and draws together how successive early modern rulers in Britain transformed the collection, preservation, and use of information as they expanded their influence and rule over South Asia and the Americas. Through an analysis of the forms of knowledge encountered by British travelers and administrators and powerful ideas about the role of information in the governance of native populations and Europeans alike, Siddique offers a new history of how mastery over territory, peoples, and information came to be seen as related endeavors.

The Archive of Empire: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Asheesh Kapur Siddique

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Kevin Pham, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, about his recent book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024). 

In his book, Pham traces the evolution of Vietnamese political thought through six figures, Phan Bội Châu, Phan Chu Trinh, Nguyễn An Ninh, Phạm Quỳnh, Hồ Chí Minh, and Nguyễn Mạnh Tường. He explores how across the 19th and 20th centuries, as generations of Vietnamese thinkers responded to and organized against French and US colonialism, they debated distinct and powerful ways to conceptualize politics, mobilize their people, organize their society, and build a nation through decolonization.

The Architects of Dignity: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Kevin Pham

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Stephen Legg about his new book, "Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities" (University of Georgia Press, 2025). In the book, Legg provides a study of Indian anti-colonialism in the decades before Independence that foregrounds the spatially-mediated and bottom-up politics of old and New Delhi’s poor, its middle classes, and the prominent anti-colonial figures of the Indian National Congress, including especially the women of the anti-colonial movement. He centers the concept of parrhesia (from the later lectures of Michel Foucault) to arrive at an account of the governmentality of anti-colonialism in the years between mass civil disobedience and the Quit India Movement.

Spaces of Anticolonialism: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Stephen Legg

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sam Klug about his new book The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In this book, Klug explores how the process of decolonization in the 1940s–70s transformed US debates about the role of race in American life, via the analogy of the “internal colony.” The comparison between how race operated in the US and how colonialism functioned in the world was taken up by activists, social scientists, and policymakers alike, and transformed how Black social movements and the US government approached their respective attempts to change American society at the level of race, class, and global politics.

The Internal Colony: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sam Klug

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quentin Skinner on his new book Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge University Press, 2025). In this book, Skinner traces how liberty as a political ideal became tied to independence and the absence of coercion through the political upheavals of early modern England, debates about absolute
monarchy, the American Revolution, discussions of women's independence under the law, and the role of slavery in defining what it meant to be free.

Liberty as Independence: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Quentin Skinner

In this most recent episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sophia Rosenfeld about her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her book explores how the idea of making a choice from a menu of options arranged by someone else became synonymous with what it meant to be free between the early modern period and the 20th century, via shifts to consumer culture, religious life, romance, and reproduction. 

The Age of Choice: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Sophia Rosenfeld

In Theory co-host Disha Karnad Jani interviews Durba Mitra, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, about her new book, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Indian Sex Life: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Durba Mitra

In Theory co-host Disha Karnad Jani interviews Vincent Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, about his new book, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War(Belknap Press HUP: 2020).

The Story of an Atlantic Slave War: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Vincent Brown

Peter de Bolla, Ewan Jones, Paul Nulty, Gabriel Recchia, and John Regan, all affiliated with the Cambridge Concept Lab, have coauthored the article "The Idea of Liberty, 1600–1800: A Distributional Concept Analysis," published in the most recent issue (81.3, July 2020) of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Peter De Bolla spoke with Brendan Mackie, a contributing editor at the JHI Blog, about their article.

Broadly Speaking: Peter De Bolla on Liberty and Concept Analysis

In Theory co-host Disha Karnad Jani interviews Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, about his new book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century(Monthly Review Books: 2020).

The Dawning of the Apocalypse: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Gerald Horne

In Theory co-host Simon Brown interviews Anthony Grafton, the Henry Putnam Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, about his new book, Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe(Harvard University Press: 2020).

Inky, Laborious Humanism: Simon Brown interviews Anthony Grafton

In Theory co-host Disha Karnad Jani interviews Erika Lorraine Milam, Professor of History at Princeton University, about her book, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America(Princeton University Press: 2019).

Human Nature in Cold War America: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Erika Lorraine Milam

In Theory co-host Disha Karnad Jani interviews Elleni Centime Zeleke, assistant professor in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, about her book, Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 (Brill, 2019).

Ethiopia in Theory: Disha Karnad Jani interviews Elleni Centime Zeleke

In Theory is the podcast of the Journal of the History of Ideas blog. The hosts of the JHI Blog team interview intellectual scholars in the fields of philosophy, literature, art history, natural and social sciences, religion, and political thought about their latest books and works. The aim of the JHI podcast is to highlight the huge diversity of intellectual history at university departments across the world.

In Theory: The JHI Blog Podcast

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