New Books In European Studies

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cages and massive, rigid garments that women had been obliged to wear for centuries. They slipped into light, mobile dresses, cropped their hair short, wrapped themselves in shawls, and championed the handbag. Juliette made the new style stand for individual liberty. The erotic audacity of these fashion revolutionaries conquered Europe, starting with Napoleon. Everywhere a fashion magazine could reach, women imitated the news coming from Paris. It was the fastest and most total change in clothing history. Two centuries ahead of its time, it was rolled back after only a decade by misogynist rumors of obscene extravagance. As Dr. Anne Higonnet s

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Corey Ross tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today. Spanning the major European empires of the period, Dr. Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfo

Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin (Berghahn Books, 2024) by Dr. Meghana Joshi engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’ This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your

What is the connection between where people live and how they vote? In The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales (Oxford UP, 2024), Jamie Furlong a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster and Will Jennings Associate Dean Research & Enterprise and Professor at the University of Southampton, analyse the continuities and changes in history of party support at general elections. The book uses a variety of methods- and a huge range of data- to critically interrogate the idea of ‘left behind’ places, as well as interrogating the long term social, economic, and cultural changes associated with those places and that idea. Rich in detail, including case studies of places that stand out within the overall trends, and accessibly written, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Southeast Asia Program Publications/Cornell UP, 2022) asks why the peace process stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities. Winning by Process argues that stalled conflicts are more than pauses or stalemates. "Winning by process," as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state's ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values e

Theo Williams’ Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation (Verso, 2022) shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. A history that runs from 1929 to the years after WWII here we see a number of significant activists and intellectuals such as George Padmore, C.L.R. James, Jomo Kenyatta and Amy Ashwood Garvey, establish significant groups on the British Left and how they related to the dominant groups in this field, most notably the Communist Party of Great Britian (CPGB) and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). As Williams shows, while these activists continually emphasised the need to combine international socialism with colonial liberation, these other groups were often resistant to this, with the CPGB responding to the shifting demands of international communism and the ILP facing internal splits on the role of colonialism. Despite these frustrations, these activists develop a significant r

Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, translators, poets, playwrights, and essayists to see how they both reacted to and in turn shaped cultural discourses, especially around learned women and the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. From Marie de Gournay's polemic translations to the conteuses fairy tales, Greco-Roman culture provided inspiration, authorization, and means of self-fashioning for a wide range of women writers. Women Writing Antiquity is perfect for readers interested in classical reception, women's writers, authorial strategies, gender history, and French literature. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual hist

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the history of ancient and Medieval technologies. The pair use Long’s forthcoming book, Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), as a launching point but also cover her previous work, especially including Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2018), which, among other things, contains deep reflections on the history of maintenance. Long and Vinsel also discuss Long’s future projects, including a fascinating sounding study of the history of sumptuary laws - regulations on expenditures of luxury goods, including food, clothing, and personal items - and their connection to technological change. GET EXCITED! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbo

Over 150 years ago, Marx published the first volume of Capital, a systematic and voluminous account of capitalism, from the economic bedrock all the way up to the social and political consequences. The book itself would stand as one of the most influential and decisive texts of all time, proving to be a wildly fruitful foundation for further research into everything it touched, and also becoming a cornerstone text for various political movements that would try and develop the critical analysis into a workable theory of action and social transformation. Even after its 1867 publication, the text remained a fluid, dynamic object, with a 2nd edition being put out in Marx’s own lifetime and a 3rd and 4th edition being published posthumously under the stewardship of Friedrich Engels. These later editions would be the foundations for the first two translations of the text into English, first by Edward Aveling and Sam Moore in 1887, and then by Ben Fowkes in 1976. Now in 2024, we can add a third version of the text i

Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marco Bastos presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation. The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding into polarisation and echo-chamber communication. It pulls the curtain back on the techniques employed to interfere with, and potentially distort, the public discussion. Making complex data accessible to non-technical audiences, this unique post-mortem of the Brexit referendum contributes to our understanding of social media disinformation in the UK and beyond. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Lea

The Great War haunted the British Empire. Shell shocked soldiers relived the war's trauma through waking nightmares consisting of mutilated and grotesque figures. Modernist writers released memoirs condemning the war as a profane and disenchanting experience. Yet British and Dominion soldiers and their families also read prophecies about the coming new millennium, experimented with séances, and claimed to see the ghosts of their loved ones in dreams and in photographs. On the battlefields, they had premonitions and attributed their survival to angelic, psychic, or spiritual forces. For many, the war was an enchanting experience that offered proof of another world and the transcendental properties of the mind. Between 1914 and 1939, an array of ghosts lived in the minds of British subjects as they navigated the shocking toll that death in modern war exerted in their communities. Kyle Falcon is a historian specialising in the British Empire during the First World War. He is based in Ontario, Canada. Morteza Haj

Serena Laiena joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Theater Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing (University of Delaware Press, 2023).  Who were the first celebrity couples? How was their success forged? Which forces influenced their self-fashioning and marketing strategies? These questions are at the core of this study, which looks at the birth of a phenomenon, that of the couple in show business, with a focus on the promotional strategies devised by two professional performers: Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654) and Virginia Ramponi (1583–ca.1631). This book examines their artistic path – a deliberately crafted and mutually beneficial joint career – and links it to the historical, social, and cultural context of post-Tridentine Italy. Rooted in a broad research field, encompassing theatre history, Italian studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, and performance studies, The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy revises the conventional view of the Italian diva, i

Francesco Piraino’s Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) is a vital contribution to the growing field of Sufism in the Global North which often encompasses studies of North America and western Europe. This monograph study, the first focused study of Sufism in Italy and France, uses ethnographic data and sociological analysis to map and situate various Sufi communities in Paris and Milan, along with transnational flows of these communities across Morocco, Algeria, and Cyprus.  At the heart of these case studies is the question of how to approach and study Sufi communities across an ever diversifying social, religious/spiritual, and political landscape and across categorical commitments such as New Age, New Religious Movements, esotericism, diasporic Islam, Traditionalism and mysticism. Piraino argues for the limitations and utilities of these various categories, and ultimately helps us shift our focus to to the everyday embodied ebbs and flows of a variety

The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of a character type that was developed in early modern Britain to discredit radical prophets during an era that witnessed the dismantling of the Church of England's traditional means for punishing heresy. As William Cook Miller shows, the caricature of fanaticism, here called the Enthusiast began as propaganda against religious dissenters, especially working-class upstarts, but was adopted by a range of writers as a literary vehicle for exploring profound problems of spirit, soul, and body and as a persona for the ironic expression of their own prophetic illuminations. Taking shape through the public and private writings of some of the most insightful authors of seventeenth-century Britain-Henry More, John Locke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Mary Astell, and Jonathan Swift, among others-the Enthusiast appeared in various guises and literary modes. By attending to this literary being and its anima

Today I talked to Julia Caterina Hartley about Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbury. 2023). New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France's perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary culture of the period. In an ambitious study spanning poetry, historiography, fiction, travel-writing, ballet, opera, and marionette theatre, Julia Hartley reveals the unique place that Iran held in the French literary imagination between 1829 and 1912. Iran's history and culture remained a constant source of inspiration across different generations and artistic movements, from the 'Oriental' poems of Victor Hugo to those of Anna de Noailles and Théophile Gautier's strategic citation of Persian poetry to his daughter J

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science. In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola Bertucci's In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) brilliantly reveals the mysteries of Nollet's journey, uncovering a subterranean world of secretive and ambitious intelligence gathering masked as scientific inquiry. The advent of electricity was a pivotal phenomenon not only in the history of physical experimentation, but also in the cultivation of popular scientific interest. Nollet's journey was supposedly inspired by

Annette Kehnel joins Jana Byars to talk about The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (Brandeis University Press, 2024). A fascinating blend of history and ecological economics that uncovers the medieval precedents for modern concepts of sustainable living. In The Green Ages, historian Annette Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon.  Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably--we've done it before! From the garden economy in the mythical-sounding City of Ladies to early microcredit banks, Kehnel uncovers a world at odds with our understanding of the typical medieval existence. Premodern history is full of inspi

Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents of the 'movement'. This book cuts the Gordian knot. There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept. Currently 'the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines, notably history, philosophy, political theory, political science, literary studies, and theology; Clark calls for a fundamental reconsideration in each.  The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History (Oxford UP, 2024) provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each--and, more broadly, between the five societies--has been overstated

Charmian Mansell joins Jana Byars to talk about Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2024).  What was it like to be a woman in service in early modern England? Drawing on evidence recorded in church court testimony, Mansell excavates experiences of over a thousand female servants between 1532 and 1649. Intervening in histories of labour, gender, freedom, law, migration, youth, and community, Female Servants in Early Modern England rethinks traditional scholarship of servant institution. De-coupling 'household' and 'service', it highlights the importance of female servants' labour to the wider economy and their key role in broader social networks and communities, despite their high mobility. Moving beyond regulatory codes of service prescribed by law and conduct literature, Mansell reveals the varied experiences of these women in service, both fluid and contingent: in early modern England, service (and the freedoms it allowed) was in flux. This book is available open access here.