Shows / New Books in Critical Theory
New Books in Critical Theory
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Critical Theory
Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)
The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)
All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and…
- New Books in Critical Theory
J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)
In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)
How can cultural industries survive in the twenty-first century? In Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future Caitlin Vincent, a…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)
A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century A popular truism derived from…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism with Thea Riofrancos
Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)
How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Julia Elyachar, "On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo" (Duke UP, 2025)
On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025) by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora, "Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Screening Precarity integrates a cultural analysis of film texts and history, industry transformations, and the violence and crises of political economy…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, "Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Origins and Contemporary Realities" (Speaking Tiger, 2025)
Why does Indias police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution, tasked with…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)
What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Hans Kundnani, "Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project" (Oxford UP, 2023)
"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)
What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, "Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life" (Reaktion, 2023)
Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life (Reaktion, 2023) recreates medieval people’s experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)
The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Philippe Huneman, "Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Why did triceratops have horns? Why did World War I occur? Why does Romeo love Juliet? And, most importantly, why ask why? In Why?: The Philosophy Behind the…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Russell T. McCutcheon, "Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion" (Routledge, 2023)
Russell T. McCutcheon's essay collection Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Routledge, 2023) argues that the study of religion…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Daniel M. Herskowitz, "The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (Liverpool UP, 2025) offers a new interpretation of Franz Rosenzweig's magnum opus The Star of Redemption…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Henrike Kohpeiß, "Bourgeois Coldness" (Divided Publishing, 2025)
Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025) refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Marcus Willaschek, "Kant: A Revolution in Thinking" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Beenash Jafri, "Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian…
New Books in Critical TheoryLucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi, "Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production" (CEU Press, 2025)
In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi to talk about their edited volume, Replaying Communism: Trauma and…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and the Discontinuous in Human Thought" (Allen Lane, 2025)
A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world’s most influential philosophers. How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Negar Mansouri and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín eds., "Ways of Seeing International Organisations: New Perspectives for International Institutional Law" (Cambridge UP, 2025
For decades, the field of scholarship that studies the law and practice of international organisations -also known as 'international institutional law'- has…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts" (Yale UP, 2025)
Medieval Europe was preoccupied with magic. From the Carolingian Empire to Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, great rulers, religious figures, and scholars…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Dan Edelstein, "The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Michael Staunton, "Thomas Becket and His World" (Reaktion Books, 2025)
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…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Ayoush Lazikani, "The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing" (Yale UP, 2025)
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…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Chad Augustine Córdova, "Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Mark Griffiths, "Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Checkpoint 300, the highly securitized border facility between occupied Bethlehem and Jerusalem, is a central feature of Israeli control of Palestinian land…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Matt Houlbrook, "Songs of Seven Dials: An Intimate History of 1920s and 1930s London" (Manchester UP, 2025)
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…
- New Books in Critical Theory
The Renaissance of Marxist Studies: A Discussion with Babak Amini
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…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Benjamin Balthaser, "Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left" (Verso Books, 2025)
Since October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed a massive American Jewish uprising in support of Palestinian liberation. Through sit-ins in Congress or Grand…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
In Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Patrick Gamsby, "Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy and Modernity" (Routledge, 2025)
Henri Lefebvre is a writer who has had many competing claims for ownership, from sociology to philosophy to urban geography, different scholars have attempted…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Nicholas Gamso, "Art After Liberalism" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Art After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)
An important critic of modern culture, American economist Thorstein Veblen is best known for the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” the ostentatious display…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Joe Greenwood-Hau," Capital, Privilege and Political Participation" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
Who gets involved in politics? In Capital, Privilege and Political Participation (Liverpool UP, 2025) Joe Greenwood-Hau a Lecturer in the John Smith Centre…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Elizabeth Anne Davis, "The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context" (Fordham UP, 2024)
In 2009, the body of a former president of the Republic of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, was stolen from his grave. The Time of the Cannibals reconsiders this…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Piotr Nowak, "After Jews: Essays on Political Theology, Shoah and the End of Man" (Anthem Press, 2025)
After Jews: Essays on Political Theology, Shoah and the End of Man (Anthem Press, 2025) is an attempt to describe and critically interpret the condition of man…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Mary Edwards, "Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him…
- New Books in Critical Theory
160* Hannah Arendt's Refugee Politics (JP)
John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Can Feminism be African?: A Conversation with Minna Salami
Transcript of the interview Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Yehudah Halper, "Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)
Today we will be talking to Yehudah Halper about his new book, Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge (Academic Studies Press, 2025). The twelfth-century…
New Books in Critical TheoryOn Democracy and Bullshit with Hélène Landemore
Today I’m speaking with Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about Democracy and Bullshit, with a special focus on her 2020…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Jemma Deer, "Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Jemma Deer’s Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020) invites the reader to take a moment and to ponder on the way…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Rizvana Bradley, "Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form" (Stanford UP, 2023)
In Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford UP, 2023), Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Sophie Bishop, "Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture" (U California Press, 2025)
How are influencers changing the arts? In Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture (U California Press…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Dag Nikolaus Hasse, "What Is European? On Overcoming Colonial and Romantic Modes of Thought" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)
It is common to define Europe by its democratic, scientific, religious, and cultural traditions. But in What is European? On Overcoming Colonial and Romantic…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Lars Cornelissen, "Neoliberalism and Race" (Stanford UP, 2025)
In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Joseph Stiglitz, "The Origins of Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Joseph E. Stiglitz has had a remarkable career. He is a brilliant academic, capped by sharing the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the Nobel Peace Prize…
- New Books in Critical Theory
Mattin, "Social Dissonance" (MIT Press, 2022)
We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively…
- New Books in Critical Theory
James Scorer, "Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame" (U Texas Press, 2024)
How do comics cross boarders? In Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame James Scorer, a Professor of Latin American Studies…