David Wright, “Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility,” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Political thinkers from Plato to John Adams saw revolutions as a grave threat to society and advocated for a constitution that prevented them by balancing social interests and forms of government. The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (Princeton UP, 2025) traces how evolving conceptions of history ushered in a faith in the power of revolution to create more just and reasonable societies. Taking readers from Greek antiquity to Leninist Russia, Dan Edelstein describes how classical philosophers viewed history as chaotic and directionless, and sought to keep historical change—especially revolutions—at bay. This conception prevailed until the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers conceived of history as a form of progress and of revolution as its catalyst. These ideas were put to the test during the French Revolution and came to define revolutions well into the twentieth century. Edelstein demonstrates how the coming of the revolution leaves societies divided over its goals, giving rise to new forms of violence in which rivals are targeted as counterrevolutionaries.A panoramic work of intellectual history, The Revolution to Come challenges us to reflect on the aims and consequences of revolution and to balance the value of stability over the hope for change in our own moment of fear and upheaval. Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) professor of political science and of history at Stanford University. His many books include On the Spirit of Rights and The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

10 Dec 1h

Thomas Becket and His World (Reaktion Books, 2025) explores the turbulent life and violent death of Thomas Becket, one of the most controversial figures of the Middle Ages. From a London merchant’s son to royal chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury, Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 elevated him to England’s most celebrated saint. Michael Staunton looks at Becket’s complex and contested legacy, drawing from Becket's own words and those of his contemporaries. Based on extensive contemporary medieval sources, this account offers a fresh perspective on Thomas Becket’s life and places him within the broader landscape of twelfth-century England and Europe – a time of rapid change, conflict and achievement. Thomas Becket and His World is perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about this pivotal figure in medieval history. Michael Staunton is Professor of Medieval History at University College Dublin. He is an internationally recognized expert on Thomas Becket. His books include The Historians of Angevin England (2017). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

10 Dec 1h 11min

When they gazed at the moon, medieval people around the globe saw an object that was at once powerful and fragile, distant and intimate—and sometimes all this at once. The moon could convey love, beauty, and gentleness; but it could also be about pain, hatred, and violence. In its circularity the moon was associated with fullness and fertility. Yet in its crescent and other shifting forms, the moon could seem broken, even wounded.  In this beautifully illustrated history The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing (Yale UP, 2025), Ayoush Lazikani reveals the many ways medieval people felt and wrote about the moon. Ranging across the world, from China to South America, Korea to Wales, Lazikani explores how different cultures interacted with the moon. From the idea that the Black Death was caused by a lunar eclipse to the wealth of Persian love poetry inspired by the moon’s beauty, this is a truly global account of our closest celestial neighbour. Ayoush Lazikani is a lecturer at the University of Oxford. A specialist in medieval literature, she is the author of Cultivating the Heart and Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, and an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

6 Dec 37min

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today’s plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever. Author Chad Córdova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. In addition to this new book, he is the author of many articles on figures and concepts that appear in this book, such as Montaigne, Kant, and Heidegger—most recently in Essais: Revue interdisciplinaire d’humanités and The Comparitist. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

6 Dec 55min

Checkpoint 300, the highly securitized border facility between occupied Bethlehem and Jerusalem, is a central feature of Israeli control of Palestinian land and life. An apparatus of turnstiles, overcrowded corridors, and invasive inspections, the checkpoint regulates the movement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, granting access to some while excluding most. Offering a nuanced exploration of space in Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Mark Griffiths reveals Checkpoint 300 as a stark symbol of Israeli colonialism that embodies larger systems of control and violence. Griffiths’s sensitive and timely work highlights the myriad ways Palestinians are affected by Israel’s spatial control—whether they travel through the checkpoint or not—demonstrating how colonial infrastructures of inequity extend far beyond their physical boundaries to shape daily life. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, Griffiths examines how colonial power infiltrates family dynamics, enforces gendered mobility restrictions, shapes local economies, and extends into the global exchange of capital and security technologies. He also underscores how Palestinians endure and resist under oppressive conditions and how indigenous forms of life and living are sustained, illuminating how colonial space is contested and countered, unmade and remade. Blending meticulous research with vivid human stories to show the lived realities of borders, power, and resistance in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 portrays the checkpoint as an entry into the ways that colonial space is formed through security infrastructure that is both the product and producer of wider geographies of oppression, complicity, and control. Mark Griffiths is reader in political geography at Newcastle University. He is coeditor of Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

3 Dec 47min

How has central London changed in the last 100 years? In Songs of Seven Dials An Intimate History of 1920s and 1930s London (Manchester UP, 2025), Matt Houlbrook, a Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham, tells the story of a part of London that was the site for major contests over urban development, race, and the future of the city. Centred around a libel trial brought by a local café owner resisting the press’ lies about the area. From this, the book explores the wider context of property investment, the circulation of capital, the impact of Empire, and the changing meaning of what is now one of London’s most visited and most fashionable areas. The book will appeal to academic and general audiences, showing how the story of Seven Dials is still important to contemporary life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

2 Dec 53min

The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in academic research in Marxism and related fields, and many researchers have been stepping up to the plate to offer rigorous analysis and critical reanimations of Marxist theory. One particularly exciting place where this is included is the Palgrave series Marx, Engels and Marxisms, which has been steadily putting new titles out for close to a decade. Including original monographs, edited collections and translated texts, the series covers a wide variety of topics for those interested in rediscovering and developing a Marxism ready to face the 21st century. This conversation with one of the editors is intended to serve as an overview of the series, with more traditional episodes to follow in the near future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

1 Dec 20min

In Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

30 Nov 1h 3min