Yesterday
Craig Perry, "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Slavery was a key part of pre-modern Islamic society, spanning from soldiers to concubines. And one of the most revealing repositories of evidence we have for how slavery worked in practice comes from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of hundreds of thousands of discarded documents from ... Show More
47m 11s
Apr 21
James Bultema, "Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016" (Springer, 2026)
In Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016 (Springer Nature, 2026), James Bultema identifies and investigates four central factors that gave rise to the Turkish Protestant movement in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twen ... Show More
1 h
Apr 19
Nathaniel Greenberg, "The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11" (Columbia UP, 2026)
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-la ... Show More
48m 38s
Aug 2021
Eliza Ablovatski, "Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
In the wake of the First World War and Russian Revolutions, Central Europeans in 1919 faced a world of possibilities, threats, and extreme contrasts. Dramatic events since the end of the world war seemed poised to transform the world, but the form of that transformation was uncle ... Show More
1 h
Jul 2025
Anahid Matossian, "Syrian-Armenian Women Migrants in Armenia: Gender, Identity and Painful Belonging" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
After the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian War, a number Syrian-Armenians who had lived in the territory for generations, fled to the Republic of Armenia. This book traces the experiences of Syrian-Armenian women as they navigated their changing and gendered identities from their adop ... Show More
1h 11m
Mar 2019
089 The Breakdown of Peace
<p>In this episode, we discuss the mid-5th century BC history of two areas that were important economically and politically to Athens—the west (including the Sikel Revolt, Syracuse's defeat of Akragas, the establishment of the panhellenic colony of Thourii, and the new Athenian a ... Show More
1h 47m
Jul 2024
Michael J. Sheridan, "Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants" (Routledge, 2023)
Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline pla ... Show More
1h 1m
Sep 2024
A 1,300 History of the Middle East in Seven Religious Wars
From the taking of the holy city of Jerusalem in the 7th century AD by Caliph Umar, to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, Christian popes, emperors and kings, and Muslim caliphs and sultans were locked in a 1300-year battle for political, militar ... Show More
48m 58s
Jun 2025
Samer Abboud | Syria's Political History From 1946
<p>Professor Samer Abboud from Villanova University is an expert on Syrian politics. He joins us to discuss the intricacies of Syria's political history from 1946 to the present, including the impact of French colonial rule, frequent coups, the United Arab Republic, the rise and ... Show More
1h 4m
Sep 2019
Charlie Laderman, "Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order" (Oxford UP, 2019)
In Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2019), Charlie Laderman exposes the way that imperial ambitions suffused the ideas and practices of turn-of-century humanitarian intervent ... Show More
1h 12m
Sep 2025
Ashish Prashar: Witnessing Apartheid & Advocacy | Sumud Podcast
🎙️ This week on the Sumud Podcast, we’re joined by Ashish Prashar, a political strategist and human rights activist who has advised Middle East peace envoys, UK politicians, and international bodies. He shares a unique perspective shaped by years of firsthand experience in Israe ... Show More
54m 59s
Mar 2024
Stefanos Geroulanos, "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" (Liveright, 2024)
Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, ... Show More
1h 14m
From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions ... Show More
