Yesterday

Alex Law, "The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process" (Routledge, 2026)

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it, for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland had the same co ... Show More

1h 34m

Apr 24

Vin Nardizzi, "Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

John Gerard’s natural history of plants, The Herball (1597), is considered a failure in the history of science. Despite this reputation, it has endured as an aesthetic resource. Its illustrations were used as needlework patterns, and strewn across its pages are extracts of classi ... Show More

1h 42m

May 30

Annette Gordon-Reed ed., "Jefferson on Race: A Reader" (Princeton UP, 2026)

From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writings on race that every American should read Among America’s Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controve ... Show More

1h 6m

Feb 2024

Michael Johnston, "The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Michael Johnston's The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500 (Oxford UP, 2023) addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Wh ... Show More

43m 19s

Mar 2023

Jessica Brantley, "Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Today’s guest is Jessica Brantley, Professor of English at Yale University. Professor Rosenberg is the author of the previous monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Exemplaria, and the Journa ... Show More

49m 52s

Oct 2023

James White, "Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the court ... Show More

1h 8m

Oct 2023

Anna Ziajka Stanton, "The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability" (Fordham UP, 2023)

Critics have long viewed translating Arabic literature into English as an ethically fraught process of mediating between two wholly incommensurable languages, cultures, and literary traditions. Today, Arabic literature is no longer “embargoed” from Anglophone cultural spaces, as ... Show More

37m 38s

Jun 2020

Lara Harb, "Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book ... Show More

1h 3m

Oct 2022

Sandeep Banerjee, "Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony" (Routledge, 2021)

Sandeep Banerjee's book Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony (Routledge, 2021) illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British In ... Show More

37m 20s

Oct 2021

Hongjian Wang, "Decadence in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: A Comparative and Literary-Historical Reevaluation" (Cambria Press, 2020)

European Decadence, a controversial artistic movement that flourished mainly in late-nineteenth-century France and Britain, has inspired several generations of Chinese writers and literary scholars since it was introduced to China in the early 1920s. Translated into Chinese as tu ... Show More

1h 26m

Nov 2021

Beatrice Gruendler, "The Rise of the Arabic Book" (Harvard UP, 2020)

How did it happen that, in the 13th century, Europe's largest library owned fewer than 2,000 volumes while Baghdad alone boasted of several libraries holding from 200,000 to 1,000,000 books each? In The Rise of the Arabic Book (Harvard UP, 2020), Beatrice Gruendler traces the sto ... Show More

1h 28m

Nov 2019

74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical and cultural context, and drawing connections between art and its context can b ... Show More

1h 6m

Michael Johnston, "The Middle English Bo...