A masterful narrative history of the dangerous lives of pirates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revealing their unique impact on colonialism and empire. The pirates that exist in our imagination are not just any pirates. Violent sea-raiding has occurred in most parts of the world throughout history, but our popular stereotype of pi…

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness (Penn State UP, 2024), Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects posse…

Loneliness is what results when a person is cut off from the living world. Ecological loneliness, in particular, is reciprocal - what we mete out always comes back to trouble us. However, as Laura Marris demonstrates, loneliness can entail the shadow work for understanding how a society based on capital and on growth, can create profound isolation.…

When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European towns is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of E…

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Elese Dowden. Dr Elese Dowden is a writer and philosopher from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her doctoral work was on ethical restoration after historical injustice, and her ongoing cross-disciplinary research interests include Continental philosophy, Australian and New Zealand literature, critical theory, history and col…

This summer, sound artist and “guerrilla academic” Ben Coleman got in touch to say how much he enjoys Phantom Power. He also suggested we check out another podcast he’s into called Love is the Message. We’re glad we did! Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a fantastic show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors…

Queens of the Underworld: A Journey into the Lives of Female Crooks (The History Press, 2021) tells the incredible story of Britain's female gangsters from the seventeenth century to the present day. Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Ronnie Biggs, the Krays ... All have become folk heroes, glamorized and romanticized, even when they killed. But where are th…

A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024) tells the little-known story of "segregation scholarships" awarded by states in the US South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre-Brown v. Board of Education era. Under the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, decades e…

In 2020, Latinos became the second largest ethnic voting group in the country. They make up the largest plurality of residents in the most populous states in the union, as well as the fastest segment of the most important swing states in the US Electoral College. Fitting neither the stereotype of the aggrieved minority voter nor the traditional ass…

The key to a life well-lived is prioritization, but people rarely explain how to do it effectively. In Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions (Rosenfeld Media, 2024), Harry Max provides a useful guide. He explains how learning to prioritize is helpful in life as well as at work. He explains how he - and his clien…

According to the medical world, hysteria is a thing of the past, an outdated diagnosis that has disappeared for good. Hysteria: Crime, Media, and Politics (Routledge, 2021) argues that hysteria is in fact alive and well. Hyperventilating, we rush from one incident into the next - there is hardly time for a breather. From the worldwide run on toilet…

In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression: drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history and the novel that help…

The British Marxist Historians, originally published in 1995, remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential contemporary academic traditions in history and social theory. In this classic text, Kaye looks at Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism; Rodney Hilton on feudalism and the Engl…

Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Basic Books, 2024) is the first English-language biography of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who defined individual creativity and transformed twentieth century thought. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson became the most famous philosopher on earth. Whe…

How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human develop…

Lesléa Newman is the author of over 85 books for readers of all ages, including the pioneering Heather Has Two Mommies. She has received many literary awards, and her books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Serbian, Kazakh, and Chinese.In this, our second interview, we celebrate her new picture book, entitled Hanu…

In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland — pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion o…

In The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale UP, 2024), Sara Lodge tells stories of women who brought 19th century criminals to justice, in real life and popular culture, as unacknowledged crime-fighters and feminist icons. On stage and in fiction, women detectives were sensational figures who fascinated the public with cross-dres…

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films…

Up-and-coming Vancouver trans author Harman Burns joins NBN host Hollay Ghadery to talk about Burns’ novella, Yellow Barks Spider (Radiant Press, 2024). Yellow Barks Spider takes place in the Canadian prairies, but it seeks to explore this landscape through the intimate lens of a ten-year-old trans kid. Set against the backdrop of the placid countr…

We think we know all there is to know about Britain's Second World War. We don't. This radical re-interpretation of British history and British Conservatism between 1939 and 1945 reveals the bold, at times utopian, plans British Conservatives drew up for Britain and the post-war world. From proposals for world government to a more united Empire via…

Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975 (Cornell UP, 2021) moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police deployed rigid notions of caste in their everyday tasks, refashioning rural identities in a process that …

Listen to this interview of Nicholas Boucher, PhD, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Cambridge University, UK. We talk about his coauthored paper Bad Characters: Imperceptible NLP Attacks (SP 2022) — and check out, too, Nicholas's presentation of the paper here. Nicholas Boucher: "Maybe what is interesting about the security domain is …

Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first book to tackle the subject of minorities fighting for the Soviet Union under Stalin in the Second World War. Based on meticulous archival research, it considers the interactions of the individual citizen and the Soviet state, weavin…

In Chaos and Control: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Unfolding Creative Minds (Routledge, 2018), psychoanalyst and painter Desy Safan-Gerard explores creativity, its psychodynamics, prerequisites, and possible blocks, and then engages in an extensive examination of her own creative work and process. Major themes include the importance of both acci…

Ellen Chang-Richardson’s breathtaking poetry collection, Blood/Belies, was released in spring 2024 by Wolsak & Wynn and was a third bestseller in nonfiction in Calgary, Alberta. Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, …

Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms in the 1970s and 1980s. These spheres encompassed activists in the ūman ribu (women’s lib…

Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford UP, 2021) by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee offers a groundbreaking rethinking of democracy, moving beyond its institutional frameworks to focus on its lived, everyday dimensions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the villages of Madanpur and Chishti in India, the book examines how a…