New Books in Critical Theory11 Tammi 2025

Jennifer Greenburg, "At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War" (Cornell UP, 2023)

At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integration into combat as a victory for gender equality.

Dr. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women's incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterinsurgency framing female soldiers as global ambassadors for women's rights. This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today.

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.

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God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology with N Gray Sutanto (Bloomsbury, 2024)

God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology (Bloomsbury, 2024)is the first book to apply Bavinck's theological anthropology to contemporary theological issues. Sutanto provides a sus...

14 Loka 29min

Realism After the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel with Rafael Walker (U Chicago Press, 2025)

The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisdom—is entrench a liberal model...

12 Loka 1h 6min

Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience with Laurence J. Kirmayer (Cambridge UP, 2025)

It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness ...

11 Loka 47min

Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism with Julia Bailey (U Illinois Press, 2026)

The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset that pitted the USSR’s state-spo...

10 Loka 40min

An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa with Elisa Prosperetti (Cambridge UP, 2026)

In An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge UP, 2026), Elisa Prosperetti argues that while racialized, colonial notions of development...

10 Loka 1h

Working with Critical Realism: Stories of Methodological Encounters with Alpesh Maisuria and Grant Banfield (Routledge, 2022)

Working with Critical Realism: Stories of Methodological Encounters (Routledge, 2022) is an international and interdisciplinary collection that gathers stories from researchers and research students a...

10 Loka 1h 20min

To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian with Zahi Zalloua (Bloomsbury, 2026)

In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, "How does it feel to be a problem?"In this profound response to that question, Zahi Zalloua endeavours to ...

7 Loka 49min

Think of England: Nation, People, and Race in the English Imagination with Paul Kléber Monod (Cambridge UP, 2026)

What is the basis of English national identity? How has this changed over time, and what is its future? Tracing the history of English identity over more than 2,000 years, Think of England: Nation, Pe...

7 Loka 1h 7min