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Interviews with authors of Harvard UP books.
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- Subalterns and the State with Lisa Mitchell and Hari Ramesh · 1 t. 11 min. · Episode 1549This episode features a conversation with historical anthropologist Lisa Mitchell and political theorist Hari Ramesh whose recent books make a case against anti-state thinking in…
- Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2026) · 37 min. · Episode 1548When German occupiers rolled into Paris in June 1940, they arrived wary of the French Catholic Church. In a country where more than 80 percent of citizens were Catholic, bishops…
- Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery with Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt (Belknap Press, 2026) · 55 min. · Episode 1547In this episode, Matthew Mason (Professor of History at Brigham Young University) interviews Christa Dierksheide (Brockman Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation Professor of…
- First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism with Teresa M. Bejan (Harvard UP, 2026) · 55 min. · Episode 1546Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from…
- Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession with Nicolas Guilhot (Harvard UP, 2026) · 48 min. · Episode 1545Pundits, scholars, and the general public alike have argued that conspiratorial thinking is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. In Conspiracy: The History of a Political…
- Credit to the Nation: Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Bankers and the Shaping of American Finance, 1873–1930 with Rebecca Kobrin (Harvard UP, 2026) · 60 min. · Episode 1544From a leading historian, the story of how entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants transformed commercial banking and enabled the economic and social advancement of Jews in America…
- How Girls Achieve · 1 t. 4 min. · Episode 1543How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Dr. Sally Nuamah calls “feminist…
- Audun Dahl, "Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 35 min. · Episode 1542Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing (Harvard UP, 2026), a psychologist explains why—and how—moral views change across different life stages, situations…
- Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 39 min. · Episode 562From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early…
- An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland · 1 t. 0 min. · Episode 561The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish…
- A. J. Murphy, "Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 36 min. · Episode 560The strategic landscape of the Cold War generated political support for a permanent US military force of unprecedented scale. Faced with the problem of managing this behemoth…
- Emile Chabal, "The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 1 t. 28 min. · Episode 559Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books…
- William Whyte, "The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 39 min. · Episode 558We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own…
- Ashton Lazarus, "Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 1 t. 2 min. · Episode 557What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2026) offers a new…
- Luna Sabastian, "Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 34 min. · Episode 556Fascism swept the world in the 1920s and 1930s, but not only because of the seductive rhetoric of Mussolini, Hitler, and their collaborators. In India as well, a distinctive…
- Jay Belsky, "Nature of Nurture: Rethinking Why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 38 min. · Episode 555Children who grow up in troubled circumstances―experiencing deprivation or instability, living in a dangerous neighborhood or an abusive family―are more prone to aggression…
- Paul Osterman, "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 49 min. · Episode 554A revealing look at the decline in formal employment in favor of hiring contractors, freelancers, temps, and marginal workers, who are excluded from traditional benefits and…
- Weipin Tsai, "The Making of China's Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation" (Harvard UP, 2024) · 53 min. · Episode 553How did a vast, nationwide institution like a modern postal system come into being in Qing China—right at the very end of the empire? In The Making of China’s Post Office…
- Matthieu Felt, "Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan" (Harvard UP, 2023) · 41 min. · Episode 142Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century…
- Alex Averbuch, "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 49 min. · Episode 551Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of…
- Raffaele Danna, "The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 1 t. 3 min. · Episode 550In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations…
- Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2023) · 48 min. · Episode 548Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the…
- Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 1 t. 4 min. · Episode 549Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social…
- Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 39 min. · Episode 547Panini’s Ashtadyayi is one of the most famous works in Sanskrit, a so-called “linguistic machine” that, through its 4,000 words, allows someone to generate words and grammar…
- Peter Mauch, "Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 1 t. 0 min. · Episode 546The military general who became Emperor Hirohito’s prime minister, Tojo Hideki is most often remembered as an iron-fisted leader who dragged Japan into World War II and—after…
- Entrepreneurial Work Ethic · 14 min. · Episode 545In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks with Erik Baker about the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. The dominant work ethic of our current moment, it asks us to constantly create…
- Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, "The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 1 t. 38 min. · Episode 544The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters (Harvard UP, 2026) is a groundbreaking history of political…
- Guoqi Xu, "The Idea of China: A Contested History" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 1 t. 7 min. · Episode 543What counts as China, and who counts as Chinese? China became a capitalist superpower by investing in globalization. Now that it has established its credentials—and emerged as a…
- Rian Thum, "Islamic China: An Asian History" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 41 min. · Episode 542Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not…
- Michelle Jackson, "The Division of Rationalized Labor" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 57 min. · Episode 541How have jobs changed in the last 150 years? In The Division of Rationalized Labor (Harvard UP, 2025) Michelle Jackson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at…
- Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 25 min. · Episode 540From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early…
- Ruixue Jia et al., "The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 50 min. · Episode 538The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China (Harvard UP, 2025), provides a detailed, research-driven survey of the gaokao, China's high-stakes college entrance exam. Authors…
- Sugata Bose, "Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century" (Harvard UP, 2024) · 1 t. 0 min. · Episode 539The balance of global power changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century, above all with the economic and political rise of Asia. Asia after Europe: Imagining a…
- Hang Tu, "Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 1 t. 3 min. · Episode 537How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past (Harvard UP, 2025), Hang Tu proposes…
- Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022) · 1 t. 38 min. · Episode 169In the 1920s, Józef Piłsudski was a household name not just in Poland, but across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean as well. Yet this complex and contradictory figure – a…
- Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 51 min. · Episode 535In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With…
- Jennifer Vail, "Friction: A Biography" (Harvard UP, 2026) · 32 min. · Episode 534Friction, the force that resists motion, is synonymous with difficulty and complication. If you’ve ever replaced tires worn smooth by the road or reached for a can of WD-40 to…
- Peter H. Wilson, "Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500" (Harvard UP, 2023) · 57 min. · Episode 172German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically…
- Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 1 t. 19 min. · Episode 532Around 500 BCE, the Indian scholar Pāṇini wrote a treatise on Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, describing a kind of language machine: an algebraic system of rules for producing…
- Dagomar Degroot, "Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 1 t. 11 min. · Episode 531Our solar system is a dynamic arena where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these…
- Marcy Norton, "The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492" (Harvard UP, 2024) · 57 min. · Episode 61In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe…
- Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023) · 1 t. 13 min. · Episode 187As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide…
- John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 1 t. 32 min. · Episode 188The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about slavery revolved around one…
- Marcus Willaschek, "Kant: A Revolution in Thinking" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 1 t. 4 min. · Episode 527Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the…
- Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen, "Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 58 min. · Episode 526To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the…
- Brooke Barbier, "King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father" (Harvard UP, 2023) · 46 min. · Episode 525King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard UP, 2023) is a rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose measured pragmatism helped make…
- Thomas Piketty, "A Brief History of Equality" (Harvard UP, 2022) · 27 min. · Episode 29It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the…
- Lucy Caplan, "Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 58 min. · Episode 523Recently, musicologists and others have started writing about Black participation in opera. Lucy Caplan’s Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera…
- Natasha Piano, "Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science" (Harvard UP, 2025) · 53 min. · Episode 522Do competitive elections secure democracy, or might they undermine it by breeding popular disillusionment with liberal norms and procedures? The so-called Italian School of…
- Angelos Chaniotis, "Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian" (Harvard UP, 2018) · 1 t. 7 min. · Episode 4The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard…
