Mona’s Eyes (Europa Editions, 2025) is an enchanting debut novel written by art historian Thomas Schlesser. It tells the story of a 10-year-old girl living in Paris who briefly loses her vision. After much testing, the doctor suggests that Mona might benefit from seeing a psychiatrist, and Mona’s grandfather offers to take her to her appointment ea…

Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement (Oxford UP, 2023) discusses how human lives are equated with the material, and argues that pricing lives lies at the core of the political; in fact, as in Plato or Hobbes, and in the Weberian ethics of responsibility, measurement is considered to be one of its central features. Ariel Colonomos argues …

In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa (Cambridge UP, 2025) unpacks the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that organize and circulate journalistic narratives in Africa to show that something complex is unfolding in the postcolonial context of global journalistic landscapes, especially the relationships bet…

In this episode, we spoke with Cornelia C. Walther about her three books examining technology's role in society. Walther, who spent nearly two decades with UNICEF and the World Food Program before joining Wharton's AI & Analytics Initiative, brings field experience from West Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to her analysis of how human choices shape…

Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States. It is extraordinarily difficult for historians to reconstruct the lives of individual enslaved people. Records--where they exist--are often fragmentary, biased, or untrue. In Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the …

In 1940, with the Nazis sweeping through France, Henri Matisse found himself at a personal and artistic crossroads. His 42-year marriage had ended, he was gravely ill, and after decades at the forefront of modern art, he was beset by doubt. As scores of famous figures escaped the country, Matisse took refuge in Nice, with his companion, Lydia Delec…

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, o…

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Sari Pietikainen about her new book Cold Rush (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double dev…

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as the Queen of Beauty; to Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; to Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These astoundin…

Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth century. From uranium extraction to nuclear testing, Australia’s lands became sites of imperial exploitation under the guise of national development. The continent was subject to rampant nuclear colo…

In Poland between 2015 and 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted a novel experiment. Could a governing party sustain a coalition committed religiously inspired social conservatism, old-school left-wing welfarism, and antipathy to Moscow and Brussels while also unravelling democratic institutions? It was, write Stanl…

Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025) traces Prague's origins in the ninth century through the end of the Cold War. Highlights include the golden ages of Charles IV and Rudolph II; the religious conflicts of the Hussite and Thirty Years Wars; the rich culture of Europe's largest Jewish community; the rivalry between the city's…

We begin the new season of International Horizons by asking a crucial question: is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? RBI Deputy Director, Eli Karetny talks with political writer and scholar Damon Linker about how Trump’s movement sees presidential power, why it challenges long-standing rules and institutions, and what it means for America’…

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows,” wrote King David in Psalm 23. The overflowing cup is the image that Gisela Kreglinger uses when talking about the abundance and extravagance of God’s provision for His children. Gisela Kreglinger is the daughter of winemakers and grew up on…

The Malay world boasts a wealth of diverse cultures. The arrival of Islam in the Malay world during the 12th to 13th centuries permanently transformed the aesthetic landscape, and even European colonisation could not stem this change. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Dr. Dz…

Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the world's most important diamond mining company, De Beers, as well as a gold-mining concern called Consolidated Gold Fields. While he was a busy entrepreneur, he was also a member of the Cape Colony's legi…

Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popular image of the international student in the American imagination, an image of affluence, access, and privilege. In this provocative book, higher education scholar Stephanie Kim argues that universitie…

While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice system. Scholars recognized the unique opportunity to study crime and the justice system’s response during this period, though they soon realized that determining the pandemic’s effects would…

The story of Judaism is the story of change. Throughout Jewish history, revolutionary events and subversive ideas have burst forth, repeatedly transforming Jewish experience. Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023), edited by Rabbi Stanley M. Davids (z’l) and Dr. Leah Hochman seeks t…

Hatred of Sex (U Nebraska Press, 2022) links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and …

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in Understanding Hunter S. Thompson (University of South Carolina Press, 2025), Kevin J. Hayes provides a broad and nuanced analysis of Thompson's multifaceted career and unique …

In Jesusland (ECW Press, 2025) Joelle Kidd uses a blend of cultural criticism, humor, and personal memoir akin to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror or Grace Perry’s The 2000s Made Me Gay, Kidd writes about her evangelical adolescence through the lens of Christian pop culture of the early 2000s, giving readers a peek into this odd subculture and insight …

With a growing number of students entering college with an existing mental health diagnosis, College Mental Health 101: A Guide for Students, Parents, and Professionals (Oxford UP, 2025) offers hope and clear direction to those struggling with mental illness. There is an undeniable mental health crisis on campuses these days. More students are anxi…

Radical Thinking: How to See the Bigger Picture (Swift Press, 2024) is a book about how you view the world. It's about the things that shape your thoughts, from what you notice and how you interpret it, to what you assume, believe and want. It's also about how, if you think in a radical way, you can look beyond your limited view of the world to see…

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the O…

In an era of globalized education, where ideals of freedom and inquiry should thrive, an alarming trend has emerged: foreign authoritarian regimes infiltrating American academia. In Authoritarians in the Academy, Sarah McLaughlin exposes how higher education institutions, long considered bastions of free thought, are compromising their values for f…

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the O…

For more than four centuries, the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Freud created the impression that we could explain the workings of the Universe without the idea of a creator--God. By the beginning of the twentieth century, materialism had become the dominant theory of the time. And yet, with unexpected and astonishing f…