Episodios

  • Atinuke O. Adediran, "Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Atinuke O. Adediran, "Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Jun 19 2025
    The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that challenged many institutions, including large for-profit companies, to reflect on how to address racial inequality. Large corporations began making systematic public statements to show alignment with causes that impact people of color. These statements were also used to protect corporate reputations against claims that their businesses may perpetuate racial inequality. Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress (Cambridge UP, 2025) argues that this process and others - including corporate rhetoric that leaves out past involvement in racial inequality, using disclosures about race as evidence of action, or pulling back on disclosures about race in response to conservative pushback - constrain true racial progress. Even when corporations make pledges to hire and promote people of color or fund racial equity causes through philanthropy, the book demonstrates how these pledges function to limit corporate responsibility. Critical and corrective, Disclosureland calls on the federal government and corporate stakeholders to regulate corporate race-conscious words.
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    34 m
  • Michelle Lynn Kahn, "Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Michelle Lynn Kahn, "Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Jun 11 2025
    What happens when migrants are rejected by the host society that first invited them? How do they return to a homeland that considers them outsiders? Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants, Germany's largest ethnic minority, who arrived as 'guest-workers' (Gastarbeiter) between 1961 and 1973. By the 1980s, amid rising racism, neo-Nazis and ordinary Germans blamed Turks for unemployment, criticized their Muslim faith, and argued they could never integrate. In 1983, policymakers enacted a controversial law: paying Turks to leave. Thus commenced one of modern Europe's largest and fastest waves of remigration: within one year, 15% of the migrants—250,000 men, women, and children—returned to Turkey. Their homeland, however, ostracized them as culturally estranged 'Germanized Turks' (Almancı). Through archival research and oral history interviews in both countries and languages, Michelle Lynn Kahn highlights migrants' personal stories and reveals how many felt foreign in two homelands. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Guest: Michelle Lynn Kahn (she/her), an Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Richmond. She is a scholar of the global and transnational history of Germany after 1945, with expertise in far-right extremism, migration, racism, gender, and sexuality. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke Hyperlink: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree Hyperlink: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman
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    40 m
  • Stefanie Lenk, "Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Stefanie Lenk, "Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Jun 9 2025
    Christianity is often considered prevalent when it comes to defining the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman past' is commonly regarded as an add-on for cultivated elites. Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) demonstrates the significant impact of popular Roman culture on the religious identity of common Christians from the fifth to the seventh century in the Mediterranean world. Baptism is central to the formation of Christian identity. The decoration of baptisteries reveals that traditional Roman culture persisted as an integral component of Christian identity in various communities. In their baptisteries, Christians visually and spatially evoked their links to Roman and, at times, even pagan traditions. A close examination of visual and material sources in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy shows that baptisteries served roles beyond mere conduits to Christian orthodoxy. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Stefanie Lenk is a postdoc the university of Göttingen, and she’s held other postdocs and fellowship at the Universities of Bern and Hamburg. And she, along with Jaś Elsner, was Curator at the Ashmolean’s of the international exhibition “Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
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    46 m
  • Roger Chickering, "The German Empire, 1871–1918" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Roger Chickering, "The German Empire, 1871–1918" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Jun 4 2025
    Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in Imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unification to the close of the First World War. Throughout this time, national unity remained an acute issue. It appeared to be resolved momentarily in the summer of 1914, only to dissolve in the war that followed. This volume examines the impact of rapid industrialization and urban growth on Catholics and Protestants, farmers and city dwellers, industrial workers and the middle classes. Focusing on its religious, regional, and ethnic reverberations, Chickering also examines the social, cultural, and political dimensions of domestic conflict. Providing multiple lenses with which to view the German Empire, Chickering's survey examines local and domestic experiences as well as global ramifications. The German Empire, 1871-1918 provides the most comprehensive survey of this restless era available in the English language.
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    57 m
  • Xing Hang, "The Port: Hà Tiên and the Mo Clan in Early Modern Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Xing Hang, "The Port: Hà Tiên and the Mo Clan in Early Modern Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    May 30 2025
    The Port (present-day Hà Tiên), situated in the Mekong River Delta and Gulf of Siam littoral, was founded and governed by the Chinese creole Mo clan during the eighteenth century and prospered as a free-trade emporium in maritime East Asia. Mo Jiu and his son, Mo Tianci, maintained an independent polity through ambiguous and simultaneous allegiances to the Cochinchinese regime of southern Vietnam, Cambodia, Siam, and the Dutch East India Company. A shared value system was forged among their multiethnic and multi-confessional residents via elite Chinese culture, facilitating closer business ties to Qing China. The story of this remarkable settlement sheds light on a transitional period in East Asian history, when the dominance of the Chinese state, merchants, and immigrants gave way to firmer state boundaries in mainland Southeast Asia and Western dominance on the seas. Xing Hang is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The Port: Hà Tiên and the Mo Clan in Early Modern Asia Ghassan Moazzin is Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong.
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    1 h y 5 m
  • Gazi Mizanur Rahman, "In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Gazi Mizanur Rahman, "In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    May 21 2025
    Gazi Mizanur Rahman’s In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first sustained historical study of Bengali migration to British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Drawing on archival research in South and Southeast Asia, as well as oral histories and travel accounts, Rahman reconstructs the formation of a transnational Bengali presence that has been largely overlooked in the broader literature on Indian migration. The book argues that Bengali migrants—across class, religion, and occupation—constituted a distinct group within the South Asian diaspora in the Malay world. Colonial administrators often reduced them to the generic category of “Indian,” but Bengalis in Malaya included plantation workers, lascars, domestic servants, professionals, and traders. They moved through varied migration routes and formed diverse community institutions, including mosques, cultural associations, and legal aid networks. Rahman introduces the concept of “space-making” to show how Bengali migrants created social, institutional, and urban spaces that allowed them to adapt and persist in new settings. These spaces were not only material (homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces) but also relational, sustained by kinship ties, religious practice, and civic engagement. Particularly important are the chapters on Bengali medical professionals and maritime labour, which demonstrate how this group contributed to colonial infrastructure while navigating systemic racial and occupational hierarchies. The book also engages with the postcolonial period, tracing the arrival of Bangladeshi workers in the 1980s and 1990s and the new forms of marginality they encountered. These later migrants, often undocumented or temporary, faced challenges similar to those of their predecessors but within different political and economic regimes. Rahman’s study challenges the dominant focus on Tamil and Sikh diasporas in Southeast Asia and contributes to a growing body of scholarship that disaggregates the “Indian” category in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is a methodologically rigorous and empirically rich work that will interest historians of migration, labour, and the Indian Ocean world. Soumyadeep Guha is a third-year graduate student in the History Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, with research interests in Agrarian History, the History of Science and Technology, and Global History, focusing on 19th and 20th century India. His MA dissertation, War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India, explored how wartime imperatives shaped scientific and agricultural policy during the Second World War in India. Currently, his working on his PhD dissertation on the histories of rice and its production in late colonial and early post-colonial Bengal, examining the entangled trajectories of agrarian change, scientific knowledge, and state-making.
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    51 m
  • Quentin Skinner, "Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Quentin Skinner, "Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    May 20 2025
    What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence. Illustrates the connections between philosophical debates surrounding liberty and the sociopolitical contexts in which they took place Provides a comprehensive analysis and bibliography of rival ways of thinking about liberty Explores the contribution of the American Revolution to discussions on the idea of liberty Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History, and the recipient of many awards including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. Previous publications include the two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and, most recently, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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    57 m
  • Helen Thompson on Disorder and the Analysis of Contemporary Geopolitics

    Helen Thompson on Disorder and the Analysis of Contemporary Geopolitics
    May 19 2025
    Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and co-host of the great podcast, These Times, about her approach to geopolitical analysis and the centrality of energy geopolitics in that approach. The pair start by talking about Thompson’s book, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Cambridge UP, 2023), her background and training, and how she came to develop the distinctive style of geopolitical analysis she deploys, including on episodes of These Times. Vinsel and Thompson also discuss a number of topics, including military conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and the global energy geopolitics of Net Zero, as a way of exploring Thompson’s way of thinking.
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    1 h y 16 m
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