Decomposing Historians (with Elise Garritzen)
Should you judge a book by its cover? Victorian historians and their readers did; and through examining the decisions that went into binding, titling, annotating and prefacing historical works, we can...
29 Maj 1h 5min
Plato’s Political Ideas: From Limited Rule to Tyranny (with Melissa Lane)
Who will rule the rulers? Who will chaperone the chaperones? Who will guard the guardians? These questions are rarely associated with Plato. Usually seen as the arch-defender of the rule of the enligh...
30 Mars 1h 15min
Sketching Characters: from Ancient Moralists to the Mansplainer (with Katie Ebner-Landy)
Theophrastus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He wrote widely on topics including metaphysics, plant-life, dizziness, odours, and juice. Most notably, though, he was the author of a colourful text de...
10 Feb 1h 1min
The Curious Case of Martin Crusius (with Richard Calis)
Martin Crusius (1526-1607) spent most of his life in the Lutheran town of Tübingen. While there, he became Europe's foremost expert on Ottoman Greece. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he held with...
8 Dec 202540min
Mary Wollstonecraft: The Honest Educator (with Sylvana Tomaselli)
By her death in 1797 at the age of 38, Mary Wollstonecraft had produced a body of work unmatched for its honesty and critical acumen. In a society where marriage often amounted to legal prostitution, ...
22 Okt 202557min
African-American Ideas about Race (with Mia Bay)
After the founding of the American Republic, African-American Intellectuals never accepted passively the narratives of racial difference maintained by the defenders of slavery and segregation. At a ti...
17 Sep 20251h
Liberty as Independence (with Quentin Skinner)
Sometime in the eighteenth century, a great transformation took place in the language of liberty. Since the days of the Roman Republic, to be free had meant to be independent of the arbitrary will of ...
21 Juli 20251h
Abolitionist Ideas: Battling the Slave Trade in Britain
If you visited Britain around 1700, you’d find hardly a single advocate of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. You’d hear the institution of slavery described as a moral evil, but no one w...
9 Juni 20251h 10min
