New Books in Intellectual History Podcast
1) Great Books: Nicholas Johnson on Samuel Beckett
“Another heavenly day” is the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961), where Winnie sits buried to her waist in sand, with her husband Willie stuck a few feet away from her … but langu...Show More
AUDIO REMOVED: The podcast creator has removed the audio for this episode.2) Sarah Ruden, "Vergil: The Poet's Life" (Yale UP, 2023)
The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) bec...Show More
3) Ithamar Theodor, "The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
The Bhagavad Gita is a world classic often considered to be not just the 'Hindu Bible' but sometimes the 'Indian Bible' as well. Over the last two centuries, it has attracted much scholarly attention ...Show More
4) Jochen Hellbeck, "World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews" (Penguin Group, 2025)
In the West, World War II is commonly understood as the Allies’ struggle against Nazism. Often elided, if not simply forgotten, is the Soviet Union’s crucial role in that fight. With this book, acclai...Show More
5) Maia Kotrosits, "After Transformation: Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present" (Duke UP, 2025)
In After Transformation, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present. Recasting the monumental changes that occurred between the second a...Show More
6) Verena Halsmayer on Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow’s Model as an Artifact
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, chats with Verena Halsmeyer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna, about her recent, award-winning book, Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow’s Model as ...Show More
7) 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 in a Parisian cafe working through a pack...Show More
8) David Chanoff, "Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world were galvanized by the moral power of...Show More
9) Faisal Devji, "Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam" (Yale UP, 2025)
Faisal Devji's Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale UP, 2025) is a compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor. Until the nineteenth century, Islam was...Show More
10) 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 Andalusian philosopher Averroes sought to ...Show More