Faculty Bookshelf

Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law (2019)

A robust defense of democratic populism by one of America’s most renowned and controversial constitutional scholars—the award-winning author of We the People. Populism is a threat to the democratic world, fuel for demagogues and reactionary crowds—or so its critics would have us believe. But in his award-winning trilogy We the People, Bruce Ackerman showed that Americans have repeatedly rejected this view. Now he draws on a quarter century of scholarship in this essential and surprising inquiry into the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary constitutionalism around the world. He takes us to India, South Africa, Italy, France, Poland, Burma, Israel, and Iran and provides a blow-by-blow account of the tribulations that confronted popular movements in their insurgent campaigns for constitutional democracy.

We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (2018)

The Civil Rights Revolution carries Bruce Ackerman’s sweeping reinterpretation of constitutional history into the era beginning with Brown v. Board of Education. From Rosa Parks’s courageous defiance, to Martin Luther King’s resounding cadences in “I Have a Dream,” to Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of Congress, to the Supreme Court’s decisions redefining the meaning of equality, the movement to end racial discrimination decisively changed our understanding of the Constitution.

Other publications:

• “Trump Can’t Make War Whenever He Likes” New York Times Op-Ed (April, 2018)

• “How to Stop Trump Blowing It Up,” New York Review of Books (November, 2017)

• “Will Congress Cede Its War-Making Authority to Trump?” The Atlantic (June, 2017)

• “What Happens to NATO Now?” The Atlantic (November, 2016)

The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (2007, 2014)

In this book on early Latin American narrative, Rolena Adorno argues that the foundations of the Latin American literary tradition are located in the writings that debated the rights to Spanish dominion in the Americas and the treatment of its natives. Placing the works of canonical Spanish and Amerindian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Bartolomé de las Casas in particular—within this larger polemic, she shows how their works sought credibility through reference to the narrative accounts they followed or contradicted, rather than the historical events they sought to defend or condemn. Demonstrating how these authors and their protagonists have been polemically reinvented in narrative form up to the present day, Adorno elucidates the role the “polemics of possession” played in the development of Latin American literary and political discourse.

Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2011)

A vivid account of the literary culture of the Spanish-speaking Americas from the time of Columbus to Latin American Independence, this Very Short Introduction explores the origins of Latin American literature in Spanish and tells the story of how Spanish literary language developed and flourished in the New World. A leading scholar of colonial Latin American literature, Rolena Adorno examines the writings that debated the justice of the Spanish conquests, described the novelties of New World nature, expressed the creativity of Hispanic baroque culture in epic, lyric, and satirical poetry, and anticipated Latin American Independence. The works of Spanish, creole, and Amerindian authors highlighted here, including Bartolomé de las Casas, Felipe Guaman Poma, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Andrés Bello, have been chosen for the merits of their writings, their participation in the larger literary and cultural debates of their times, and their resonance among readers today.

“National Commemoration in an Age of Transnationalism,” article in the Journal of Modern History (2019)

The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading American journal for the study of European intellectual, political, and cultural history. The Journal’s geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: the JMH explores not only events and movements in specific countries, but also broader questions that span particular times and places.

Roland Barthes’ Cinema, by Philip Watts, Dudley Andrew, Yves Citton, Vincent Debaene, and Sam Di Iorio eds (2016)

Offers the first systematic English-language critical treatment of Barthes’ writing on cinema. Provides detailed analysis of the various stages of Barthes’s intellectual itinerary. Examines Barthes’s explicit and implicit dialogue with France’s leading postwar film critic, André Bazin. Includes nine translated texts written by Barthes about cinema, as well as an exclusive interview with renown public intellectual Jacues Raciére.

André Bazin (2013; first published 1978)

André Bazin, often dubbed the father of the French New Wave, has had an immense impact on film art. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit. The journal that he founded in 1951, Cahiers du Cinéma, remains the most influential archive of cinema criticism. He remains one of the most read, most studied, and most engaging figures ever to have written about film. The last few years have witnessed a massive resurgence of interest in Bazin among critics, scholars, and students of every persuasion. His writings, a mainstay of film theory courses, are now finding a place on the syllabi of core courses in film history, criticism, and appreciation. Dudley Andrew’s intellectual biography is a landmark in film scholarship.

What Cinema Is!: Bazin’s Quest and its Charge (2010)

What Cinema Is! offers an engaging answer to Andre Bazin’s famous question, exploring his ‘idea of cinema’ with a sweeping look back at the near century of Cinema’s phenomenal ascendancy.

Other select publications:

• “For the first time on screen together: Madame Bovary and Les Misérables in 1934” Chapter in French Literature on Screen, ed. Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer (2019)
• “Holidays and the Movies in Sartre’s Imagination,” Senses of Cinema (2017)
• Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar (2005)
• Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (1995)
• Film in the Aura of Art (1984)
• Concepts in Film Theory (1984)
• The Major Film Theories (1976)
   

“Markets for Information: An Introduction,” article by Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti in  Annual Review of Economics (2019)

In this article, Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti survey a recent and growing literature on markets for information. The authors offer a comprehensive view of information markets through an integrated model of consumers, information intermediaries, and firms. The model embeds a large set of applications ranging from sponsored search advertising to credit scores to information sharing among competitors. They then zoom in to one of the critical elements in the markets for information: the design of the information. 

“Dynamic Mechanism Design: An Introduction,” article by Dirk Bergemann and Juuso Valimaki in Journal of Economic Literature (2019)

In this article, Dirk Bergemann and Juuso Valimaki provide an introduction to the recent developments in dynamic mechanism design, with a primary focus on the quasilinear case. First, they describe socially optimal dynamic mechanisms. Second, they discuss revenue optimal mechanisms. Third, they consider models with changing populations of agents over time.

Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (2017)

What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, Paola Bertucci places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France’s colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations.

“Shocking Subjects. Human experiments and the material culture of medical electricity in eighteenth-century England,” chapter in The Uses of Humans in Experiment: Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century, edited by Erika Dick and Larry Stewart (2016)

In contemporary Western societies medical patients are accustomed to being tested or treated by means of electrical instruments. Their presence is so familiar that it would be unsettling to enter a hospital or a medical laboratory unfurnished with the high tech apparatus through which research, diagnoses and therapies are routinely carried out. The technologization of medicine has produced systems of trust that rely on black boxed instruments, which profoundly influence contemporary perceptions of the human body and of the self. However, the applications of scientific instruments for medical purposes have a history of debates and controversies.

One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern (2016)

Praising Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (translated here as “One Toss of the Dice”) as “the birth certificate of modern poetry,” Bloch (A Needle in the Right Hand of God) meticulously reconstructs the events leading to its composition. He shows how the poem was a synthesis of the poet’s experiences and influences and an “enormous break with the conceptual world in place since the Renaissance” that anticipated developments in painting, music, and dance. Bloch’s analysis of the poem’s verbal and syntactical acrobatics and its resonance with later works is enlightening. For most readers, this book will be an engrossing introduction to a work of literature whose artistic significance the author makes seem inarguable.

How Words Make Things Happen (2019)

In How Words Make Things Happen, David Bromwich, a leading literary critic and political commentatorm, explores how words can turn into action. The author offers an enhanced understanding of the effects of language, both intended and inadvertent, and gives interpretations of persuasive and imaginative writing across the genres of philosophy, political oratory, drama, prose fiction, and lyric poetry. Bromwich delves into the words of various speakers and writers, including J.L. Austin, Aristotle, Cicero, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Henry James, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Walter Bagehot, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, John Stuart Mill, and Mario Savio

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (2014)

David Bromwich’s portrait of statesman Edmund Burke (1730–1797) is the first biography to attend to the complexity of Burke’s thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. The public and private writings cannot be easily dissociated, nor should they be. For Burke—a thinker, writer, and politician—the principles of politics were merely those of morality enlarged. Bromwich reads Burke’s career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be.

Moral Imagination: Essays (2014)

Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America’s premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature. Moral Imagination captures the singular voice of one of the most forceful thinkers working in America today.

A Concise History of Russia (2011)

Accessible to students, tourists and general readers alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia’s pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the political history of Russia, but also developments in its literature, art and science. Bushkovitch describes well-known cultural figures, such as Chekhov, Tolstoy and Mendeleev, in their institutional and historical contexts. Though the 1917 revolution, the resulting Soviet system and the Cold War were a crucial part of Russian and world history, Bushkovitch presents earlier developments as more than just a prelude to Bolshevik power.

“Peter the Great and the Northern War,” in Dominic Lieven, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia.vol. 2 (2006)

From the end of the fifteenth century to Peter’s time the main preoccupation of Russian foreign policy was the competition with Poland-Lithuania for territory and power on the East European plain. Peter’s new war was also a surprise because Russian foreign policy after 1667 had been preoccupied with the Ottoman Empire and its Crimean vassal. In Peter’s time, from the 1670s to 1719, the population grew from some 11 million to about 15.5 million. Russia’s foreign trade grew throughout the century, primarily through Archangel. The final war of Peter’s life was in a totally different direction, and seems to have been entirely commercial in inspiration. Peter’s dreams and Russia’s new position demanded not only a better army and navy, it demanded a new diplomatic corps. Russian culture changed rapidly after about 1650, with knowledge of Polish and Latin spreading among the elite and much geographic knowledge in translation as well.

Peter the Great: the Struggle for Power 1671-1725 (2001)

A narrative of the fifty years of political struggles at the Russian court, 1671–1725. This book shows how Peter the Great was not the all-powerful tsar working alone to reform Russia, but that he colluded with powerful and contentious aristocrats in order to achieve his goals. After the early victory of Peter’s boyar supporters in the 1690s, Peter turned against them and tried to rule through favourites - an experiment which ended in the establishment of a decentralized ‘aristocratic’ administration, followed by an equally aristocratic Senate in 1711. The aristocrats’ hegemony came to an end in the wake of the affair of Peter’s son, Tsarevich Aleksei, in 1718. After that moment Peter ruled through a complex group of favourites, a few aristocrats and appointees promoted through merit, and carried out his most long-lasting reforms. The outcome was a new balance of power at the centre and a new, European, conception of politics.

Screening Fears: On Protective Media (2023)

Francesco Casetti advances a provocative hypothesis: instead of being prostheses that expand or extend our perceptions, modern screen-based media are in fact apparatuses that shelter and protect us from exposure to the world. Rather than bringing us closer to external reality, dominant forms of visual media function as barriers or enclosures that defend against the apparent threats and dangers that seem increasingly to surround us.

Early Film Theories in Italy, 1896-1922, edited by Francesco Casetti with Silvio Alovisio and Luca Mazzei (2017)

The Lumière Galaxy. Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (2015)

Francesco Casetti believes new media technologies are producing an exciting new era in cinema aesthetics. Whether we experience film in the theater, on our hand-held devices, in galleries and museums, onboard and in flight, or up in the clouds in the bits we download, cinema continues to alter our habits and excite our imaginations.

Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (2008)

Is it true that film in the twentieth century experimented with vision more than any other art form? And what visions did it privilege? In this brilliant book, acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti situates the cinematic experience within discourses of twentieth-century modernity. He suggests that film defined a unique gaze, not only because it recorded many of the century’s most important events, but also because it determined the manner in which they were received.

Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (2011)

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the “Third Rome.” By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world.

Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953, by Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov (2007)

Leaders of the Soviet Union, Stalin chief among them, well understood the power of art, and their response was to attempt to control and direct it in every way possible. This book examines Soviet cultural politics from the Revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union, the book provides remarkable insight on relations between Gorky, Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, and many other intellectuals, and the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s role in directing these relations, and his literary judgments and personal biases, will astonish many.

The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (2019)

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the “witness to genocide” in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder.

Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (2017)

In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust’s status as humanity’s most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a “surfeit of Jewish memory” is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds. She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. Dean’s latest book summons anyone concerned with human rights to recognize the impact of cultural ideals of “deserving” and “undeserving” victims on those who have suffered.

Russian Stage Two: Welcome Back! Textbook by Irina A. Dolgova and Cynthia L. Martin (2010) 

The 2010 Russian Stage Two: Welcome Back! is designed for learners of Russian at the intermediate level who have already completed approximately 130-200 hours of elementary-level instruction.

Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (2017)

Royalist Indians and slaves in the northern Andes engaged with the ideas of the Age of Revolution (1780–1825), such as citizenship and freedom. Although generally ignored in recent revolution-centered versions of the Latin American independence processes, their story is an essential part of the history of the period. In Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution, Marcela Echeverri draws a picture of the royalist region of Popayán (modern-day Colombia) that reveals deep chronological layers and multiple social and spatial textures. She uses royalism as a lens to rethink the temporal, spatial, and conceptual boundaries that conventionally structure historical narratives about the Age of Revolution. Looking at royalism and liberal reform in the northern Andes, she suggests that profound changes took place within the royalist territories. These emerged as a result of the negotiation of the rights of local people, Indians and slaves, with the changing monarchical regime.

They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023)

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography (2019)

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila is among the most remarkable accounts ever written of the human encounter with the divine. The Life is not really an autobiography at all, but rather a confession written for inquisitors by a nun whose raptures and mystical claims had aroused suspicion. Despite its troubled origins, the book has had a profound impact on Christian spirituality for five centuries, attracting admiration from readers as diverse as mystics, philosophers, artists, psychoanalysts, and neurologists. How did a manuscript once kept under lock and key by the Spanish Inquisition become one of the most inspiring religious books of all time?

Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 (2016)

This fast-paced survey of Western civilization’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today.

Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics, edited by Emily Erikson (2015)

This collection of articles features research one distinct organizational form: the chartered company. Chartered companies were commercial and financial organizations formally recognized by state actors, often possessing monopoly privileges to regions or sectors of trade. In addition to being significant domestic actors and the organizational precursors to modern multinationals, the chartered companies were the primary vehicles behind the expansion of European political and economic hegemony, and thus central to the creation of modern global political and economic institutions as well as the global structure of trade and international political relations. 

Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company (2014)

The English East India Company was one of the most powerful and enduring organizations in history. Between Monopoly and Free Trade locates the source of that success in the innovative policy by which the Company’s Court of Directors granted employees the right to pursue their own commercial interests while in the firm’s employ. Exploring trade network dynamics, decision-making processes, and ports and organizational context, Emily Erikson demonstrates why the English East India Company was a dominant force in the expansion of trade between Europe and Asia, and she sheds light on the related problems of why England experienced rapid economic development and how the relationship between Europe and Asia shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“The Illiquidity of Water Markets: Efficient Institutions for Water Allocation in Southeastern Spain,” research paper by Javier D. Donna and José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez (2018)

This paper shows how the presence of liquidity constraints in farmers can make a market for water inefficient, and discusses under what conditions this would happen and when a system of uniform allocation (quotas) could be more efficient than a market. The co-authors of the paper were awarded the Public Utility Research Center Prize for the best paper in regulatory economics at the 2016 International Industrial Organization Conference (IIOC). 

All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (2005)

Interest in German Idealism—not just Kant, but Fichte and Hegel as well—has recently developed within analytic philosophy, which traditionally defined itself in opposition to the Idealist tradition. Yet one obstacle remains especially intractable: The Idealists’ longstanding claim that philosophy must be systematic. In this work, the first overview of the German Idealism that is both conceptual and methodological, Paul W. Franks offers a philosophical reconstruction that is true to the movement’s own times and resources and, at the same time, deeply relevant to contemporary thought.

Food: The History of Taste, edited by Paul Freedman (2007)

This richly illustrated book is the first to apply the discoveries of the new generation of food historians to the pleasures of dining and the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilizations, past and present. Editor Paul Freedman has gathered essays by French, German, Belgian, American, and British historians to present a comprehensive, chronological history of taste from prehistory to the present day. 

Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies, by Robert Wokler. Edited by Bryan Garsten (2012)

Robert Wokler was one of the world’s leading experts on Rousseau and the Enlightenment, but some of his best work was published in the form of widely scattered and difficult-to-find essays. This book collects for the first time a representative selection of his most important essays on Rousseau and the legacy of Enlightenment political thought. These essays concern many of the great themes of the age, including liberty, equality, and the origins of revolution. But they also address a number of less prominent debates, including those over cosmopolitanism, the nature and social role of music and the origins of the human sciences in the Enlightenment controversy over the relationship between humans and the great apes.  One of the central themes of the book is a defense of the Enlightenment against the common charge that it bears responsibility for the Terror of the French Revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century and the Holocaust.

Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (2009)

In today’s increasingly polarized political landscape it seems that fewer and fewer citizens hold out hope of persuading one another. Even among those who have not given up on persuasion, few will admit to practicing the art of persuasion known as rhetoric. To describe political speech as “rhetoric” today is to accuse it of being superficial or manipulative. In Saving Persuasion, Bryan Garsten uncovers the early modern origins of this suspicious attitude toward rhetoric and seeks to loosen its grip on contemporary political theory. 

“Inefficient Liquidity Provision,” article by John Geanakoplos and Kieran James Walsh in Economic Theory (2017)

In this article, the authors prove that in competitive market economies with no insurance for idiosyncratic risks, agents will always overinvest in illiquid long-term assets and underinvest in short-term liquid assets. The authors take as their setting the seminal model of Diamond and Dybvig, who first posed the question in a tractable model. 

“The Credit Surface and Monetary Policy”, chapter in Progress and Confusion: The State of Macroeconmic Policy, edited by Olivier Blanchard, Raghuram Rajan, Kenneth Rogoff, and Lawrence H. Summers (2016)

What will economic policy look like once the global financial crisis is finally over? Will it resume the pre-crisis consensus, or will it be forced to contend with a post-crisis “new normal”? Have we made progress in addressing these issues, or does confusion remain? In April of 2015, the International Monetary Fund gathered leading economists, both academics and policymakers, to address the shape of future macroeconomic policy. This book is the result, with prominent figures offering essays that address topics that range from the measurement of systemic risk to foreign exchange intervention.

“Financial Innovation, Collateral, and Investment,” article by Ana Fostel and John Geanakoplos in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics (2015)

Financial innovations that change how promises are collateralized affect prices and investment, even in the absence of any change in fundamentals. In C-models, the ability to leverage an asset always generates overinvestment compared to Arrow-Debreu. Credit Default Swaps always leads to underinvestment with respect to Arrow-Debreu, and in some cases even robustly destroy competitive equilibrium. The need for collateral would seem to cause underinvestment. This analysis illustrates a countervailing force: goods that serve as collateral yield additional services and can therefore be over-valued and over-produced. In models without cash flow problems there is never marginal underinvestment on collateral.

Annotated Reader for Caroline Link’s filmbook Jenseits der Stille.  By Marion Gehlker and Birte Christ (2010) 

Caroline Link’s Jenseits der Stille is the story of Lara, a girl with two deaf parents who is given a clarinet by her favorite aunt.  As she hones her natural talent and becomes a skillful musician, Lara feels more distant from her parents.

By adapting this novel for use in the second and third year German classroom, the editors introduce students to contemporary texts of moderate difficulty and allow them to discuss these texts within their historical and cultural contexts.

Annotated Reader for Barbara Honigmann’s novel Eine Liebe aus nichts. By Marion Gehlker and Birte Christ (2008)

Barbara Honigmann’s Eine Liebe aus nichts tells the story of a young expatriate’s journey back to Weimar to attend her father’s funeral. As the narrator remembers her father’s life, she explores her own past and relates her struggle to establish new roots following her emigration from Berlin to Paris. In its portrayal of a young woman’s complex relationship with her father, the novella offers a rich account of German-Jewish history and of the search for identity in the shadow of World War II.

This reader is designed for intermediate and advanced German classes. In addition to English glosses of challenging words, annotations are presented alongside the original German text and provide information about cultural and literary contexts. This edition also offers

“The Ukrainian Language in the Context of the Study of Sacred and Vulgar Tongues in Orthodox Slavdom,” article in Harvard Ukrainian Studies (2007)

This study examines various aspects of Orthodox Slavic linguistic consciousness in general, as well as East Slavic language speculation in particular, against the broader background of the shifting perceptions in European culture that evolved during the Middle Ages, through the period of humanism and the Renaissance, in the age of the ideological conflict between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and finally during the period prior to the age of the Slavic national revivals.

“Variance and Invariance in Cyrillo-Methodian Hagiographic Writings,” article in Festschrift for Norman W. Ingham, Russian History (2006) 

This study provides a contribution to what D.S. Likhachev would have termed the “artistic peculiarities” of Cyrillo-Methodian hagiographic writings and their relation to the “rules of the game” that underpin the “literary system” of medieval Slavic literature.

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography (2016)

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is a defining book of the Reformation and a pillar of Protestant theology. First published in Latin in 1536 and in Calvin’s native French in 1541, the Institutes argues for the majesty of God and for justification by faith alone. The book decisively shaped Calvinism as a major religious and intellectual force in Europe and throughout the world. Here, Bruce Gordon provides an essential biography of Calvin’s influential and enduring theological masterpiece, tracing the diverse ways it has been read and interpreted from Calvin’s time to today.

Calvin (2011)

During the glory days of the French Renaissance, young John Calvin (1509-1564) experienced a profound conversion to the faith of the Reformation. For the rest of his days he lived out the implications of that transformation—as exile, inspired reformer, and ultimately the dominant figure of the Protestant Reformation. Calvin’s vision of the Christian religion has inspired many volumes of analysis, but this engaging biography examines a remarkable life. Bruce Gordon presents Calvin as a human being, a man at once brilliant, arrogant, charismatic, unforgiving, generous, and shrewd.

American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (2017)

Was the United States founded as a Christian nation or a secular democracy? Neither, argues Philip Gorski in American Covenant. What the founders actually envisioned was a prophetic republic that would weave together the ethical vision of the Hebrew prophets and the Western political heritage of civic republicanism. In this ambitious book, Gorski shows why this civil religious tradition is now in peril—and with it the American experiment.

“Religion, Nationalism, and Violence: An Integrated Approach,” article in Annual Review of Sociology (2013)

Scholarly work on the nexus of religion, nationalism, and violence is currently fragmented along disciplinary and theoretical lines. In sociology, history, and anthropology, a macro-culturalist approach reigns; in political science, economics, and international relations, a micro-rationalist approach is dominant. Recent attempts at a synthesis ignore religion or fold it into ethnicity. A coherent synthesis capable of adequately accounting for religious-nationalist violence must not only integrate micro and macro, cultural and strategic approaches; it must also include a meso level of elite conflict and boundary maintenance and treat the religious field as potentially autonomous from the cultural field.

Getting Russia Right (2023)

As US-Russian relations scrape the depths of cold-war antagonism, the promise of partnership that beguiled American administrations during the first post-Soviet decades increasingly appears to have been false from the start. Why did American leaders persist in pursuing it? Was there another path that would have produced more constructive relations or better prepared Washington to face the challenge Russia poses today?With a practitioner’s eye honed during decades of work on Russian affairs, Thomas Graham deftly traces the evolution of opposing ideas of national purpose that created an inherent tension in relations. Getting Russia Right identifies the blind spots that prevented Washington from seeing Russia as it really is and crafting a policy to advance American interests without provoking an aggressive Russian response. Distilling the Putin factor to reveal the contours of the Russia challenge facing the United States whenever he departs the scene, Graham lays out a compelling way to deal with it so that the United States can continue to advance its interests in a rapidly changing world.

“Social class and the fertility transition: a critical comment on the statistical results reported in Simon Szreter’s Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860–1940,” article by Geoffrey A. Barnes and Timothy W. Guinnane in Economic History Review (2012)

Simon Szreter’s book Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860–1940 argues that social and economic class fails to explain the cross‐sectional differences in marital fertility as reported in the 1911 census of England and Wales. Szreter’s conclusion made the book immediately influential, and it remains so. This finding matters a great deal for debates about the causes of the European fertility decline of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For decades scholars have argued whether the main forces at work were ideational or social and economic. This note reports a simple graphical and statistical re‐analysis of Szreter’s own data. The authors show that social class does explain cross‐sectional differences in English marital fertility in 1911.

“State Support for the German Cooperative Movement, 1860-1914,” article in Central European History (2012)

Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura (2018)

In Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura, Leslie Harkema analyzes the literature of the modernist period in Spain in light of the emergence of youth culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Harkema argues for the prominent role played by Miguel de Unamuno—as a poet, essayist, and public figure—in Spanish writers’ response to this phenomenon. She demonstrates how early twentieth-century Spanish literature participated in the glorification of adolescence and questioning of Bildung seen elsewhere in European modernism, in ways that were not only aesthetic but also political. 

The Routledge Modern Greek Reader: Greek Folktales for Learning Modern Greek (2015)

The Routledge Modern Greek Reader has been specially designed for post-beginners to advanced learners of Greek. Written by an experienced instructor, this innovative reader offers both students and teachers of Modern Greek the pedagogical tools to utilise richly textured folktale material in a language class. Students can develop their linguistic skills while simultaneously engaging with the broader social and cultural context of the language.

Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (2016)

The Stranger is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus’s novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It’s the rare novel that’s as at likely to be found in a teen’s backpack as in a graduate philosophy seminar. If the twentieth century produced a novel that could be called ubiquitous, The Stranger is it. How did a young man in his twenties who had never written a novel turn out a masterpiece that still grips readers more than seventy years later? With Looking for “The Stranger”, Alice Kaplan tells that story. 

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (2013)

A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (2014)

Remembering Shakespeare, by David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James (2012)

“To be or not to be.” “My kingdom for a horse.” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.” How is it that Shakespeare is so well remembered? In this richly illustrated book, David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James explore Yale University’s extraordinary collection of works by or relating to William Shakespeare. They chart the winding course by which the playwright has been remembered, often in unexpected ways, for some four centuries.

Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (2013)

Paul Kennedy, award-winning author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and one of today’s most renowned historians, now provides a new and unique look at how World War II was won. Engineers of Victory is a fascinating nuts-and-bolts account of the strategic factors that led to Allied victory. Kennedy reveals how the leaders’ grand strategy was carried out by the ordinary soldiers, scientists, engineers, and businessmen responsible for realizing their commanders’ visions of success.

The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (2006)

The Parliament of Man is the first definitive history of the United Nations, from one of America’s greatest living historians. Distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy, author of the bestselling The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, gives us a thorough and timely account that explains the UN’s roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on its effectiveness and its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead. Kennedy shows the UN for what it is: fallible, human-based, often dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual administrators—yet also utterly indispensable. With his insightful grasp of six decades of global history, Kennedy convincingly argues that “it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN.”

Insulted. Belarus;Voiced of the New Belarus: Two Plays of Revolution Translated by John Freedman (2023)

Two plays of revolution — two declarations of defiance — from the vortex of Belarus 

A stunning play! I can’t get it out of my head not only because of what he depicts, but also because of how he does it … He creates a dialogue of broad utterances made at a distance, creates a dialogue among characters that never meet! 

— Valentina Golovchiner, professor of literature, Tomsk Pedagogical University, Russia. 

Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (Volume 1: 1896-1921) (2018)

Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the pasty sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-gard and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first of a three-volume study, addresses Vertov’s youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology.

True Songs of Freedom: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russian Culture and Society (2013)

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the nineteenth century’s best-selling novel worldwide; only the Bible outsold it. It was known not only as a book but through stage productions, films, music, and commercial advertising as well. But how was Stowe’s novel—one of the watershed works of world literature—actually received outside of the American context? True Songs of Freedom explores one vital sphere of Stowe’s influence: Russia and the Soviet Union, from the 1850s to the present day.

Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays by Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean (2014)

“Popular Culture in Early Modern London,” in Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock and Abigail Shinn, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England (2014)

“Shakespeare and the Golden Fleece,” in Ellen Rosand, ed., Readying Cavalli’s Operas for the Stage (2013)

After more than three centuries of silence, the voice of Francesco Cavalli is being heard loud and clear on the operatic stages of the world. The coincidence of productions at La Scala (Milan) and Covent Garden (London) in the same month (September 2008) of two different operas signals a new stage in the recovery of these extraordinary works, confined until now to special venues committed to ‘early music’-opera festivals, conservatory, and university productions. The works of the composer who is credited with having invented the genre of opera as we know it are finally enjoying a renaissance. A new edition of Cavalli’s twenty-eight operas is in preparation, and the composer and his works are at the center of a great deal of new scholarship ranging from the study of sources and production issues to the cultural context of opera of this period. In the face of such burgeoning interest, this collection of essays considers the Cavalli revival from various points of view.

“On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjunctures,” article in Modern Intellectual History (2012)

Gandhi’s critique of the modern state was central to his political thinking. It served as a pivotal hinge between Gandhi’s anticolonialism and his theory of politics and was given striking institutional form in his vision of decentralized peasant democracy. This essay explores the origins and implications of Gandhian antistatism by situating it within a genealogy of early twentieth-century political pluralism, specifically British and Indian pluralist criticism of state sovereignty and centralization. 

Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010)

Alibis of Empire presents a novel account of the origins, substance, and afterlife of late imperial ideology. Karuna Mantena challenges the idea that Victorian empire was primarily legitimated by liberal notions of progress and civilization. In fact, as the British Empire gained its farthest reach, its ideology was being dramatically transformed by a self-conscious rejection of the liberal model. The collapse of liberal imperialism enabled a new culturalism that stressed the dangers and difficulties of trying to “civilize” native peoples. And, hand in hand with this shift in thinking was a shift in practice toward models of indirect rule. As Mantena shows, the work of Victorian legal scholar Henry Maine was at the center of these momentous changes.

“Sefer Hasidim” and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe (2018)

Jewish Culture and Society in Medieval France and Germany (2014)

These studies explore the history of the Jewish minority of Ashkenaz (northern France and the German Empire) during the High Middle Ages. Although the Jews in medieval Europe are usually thought to have been isolated from the Christian majority, they actually were part of a ‘Jewish-Christian symbiosis.’ A number of studies in the collection focus on Jewish-Christian cultural and social interactions, the foundations of the community ascribed to Charlemagne, and especially on the fashioning of a martyrological collective identity in 1096.

Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (2009)

The last decade has witnessed an outpouring of Italian films that deal with Fascism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. This would appear to mark a distinct change from the postwar reluctance to represent such an infamous history. Roberto Benigni’s popular Life is Beautiful (1997) is an obvious example, but there have been a number of other works that have not been exported that also attest to a distinct tendency within Italian domestic production to address the issue. Millicent Marcus’s Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz looks at this development, attributing the new acceptance not only to an international film sensation, but to a domestic cultural climate at once receptive to Holocaust representation, and ready to produce its own forms of historical testimony.

Conditionality & Coercion: Electoral Clientelism in Eastern Europe

Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral Clientelism in Eastern Europe uses a mixed method approach to understand how illegal forms of campaigning including vote buying and electoral coercion persist in two democratic countries in the European Union. It argues that we must disaggregate clientelistic strategies based on whether they use public or private resources, and whether they involve positive promises or negative threats and coercion. We document that the type of clientelistic strategies that candidates and brokers use varies systematically across localities based on their underlying social coalitions. We also show that voters assess and sanction different forms of clientelism in different ways. Voters glean information about politicians’ personal characteristics and their policy preferences from the clientelistic strategies these candidates deploy.

From Open Secrets to Secret Voting: Democratic Electoral Reforms and Voter Autonomy (2015)

The expansion of suffrage and the introduction of elections are momentous political changes that represent only the first steps in the process of democratization. In the absence of institutions that protect the electoral autonomy of voters against a range of actors who seek to influence voting decisions, political rights can be just hollow promises. This book examines the adoption of electoral reforms that protected the autonomy of voters during elections and sought to minimize undue electoral influences over decisions made at the ballot box. Empirically, it focuses on the adoption of reforms protecting electoral secrecy in Imperial Germany during the period between 1870 and 1912. The book provides a micro-historical analysis of the democratization of electoral practices, by showing how changes in district level economic and political conditions contributed to the formation of an encompassing political coalition supporting the adoption of electoral reforms.

Taxation, Wage Bargaining, and Unemployment (2006)

Why were European economies able to pursue the simultaneous commitment to full employment and welfare state expansion during the first decades of the postwar period and why did this virtuous relationship break down during recent decades? This book provides an answer to this question, by highlighting the critical importance of a political exchange between unions and governments, premised on wage moderation in exchange for the expansion of social services and transfers. The strategies pursued by these actors in these political exchanges are influenced by existing wage bargaining institutions, the character of monetary policy and by the level and composition of social policy transfers. The book demonstrates that the gradual growth in the fiscal burden has undermined the effectiveness of this political exchange, lowering the ability of unions’ wage policies to affect employment outcomes.

The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (2003)

When and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers for various employment-related risks? What factors explain the variation in the social policy preferences of employers? This book provides a systematic evaluation of the role played by business in the development of the modern welfare state. Isabela Mares studies these critical questions and demonstrates that major social policies were adopted by cross-class alliances comprising labor-based organizations and key sectors of the business community.

The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life (2017)

The Crimean War in the British Imagination (2009)

The Crimean War not only gave us the cardigan, the balaclava, the Crimean beard and a generation of girls named Alma, it also unleashed considerable artistic and literary creativity. From Tennyson’s epic poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, to Lady Butler’s The Roll Call, the words and images created in response to this conflict have occupied an enduring place in the British imagination. So it is perhaps puzzling that this book, part of the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series, is the first to take the cultural impact of the war as its main theme.

Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (2017)

Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, had a dream in which a tree sprouted from his navel. As the tree grew, its shade covered the earth; as Osman’s empire grew, it, too, covered the earth. This is the most widely accepted foundation myth of the longest-lasting empire in the history of Islam, and offers a telling clue to its unique legacy. Underlying every aspect of the Ottoman Empire’s epic history—from its founding around 1300 to its end in the twentieth century—is its successful management of natural resources. Under Osman’s Tree analyzes this rich environmental history to understand the most remarkable qualities of the Ottoman Empire—its longevity, politics, economy, and society.

The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (2013)

Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (2011)

Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018)

The Right to Have Rights, by Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn, and Stephanie DeGooyer (2017)

Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the “inalienable” Rights of Man—before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on—there must first be such a thing as “the right to have rights.” The concept received little attention at the time, but in our age of mass deportations, Muslim bans, refugee crises, and extra-state war, the phrase has become the center of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines—including history, law, politics, and literary studies—discuss the critical basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today.

“Nabokov’s Philosophy of Art,” in Nabokov Studies (2017)

This essay is an attempt to infer and systematize Nabokov’s philosophy of art. Constantine Muravnik uses the phrase “philosophy of art” in two senses: one refers to the philosophical study of art, that is, the relation of art to aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics; the other to the ontological foundation of artistic production. Consequently, Nabokov’s philosophy of art simultaneously stands for a study of the philosophical aspects of his oeuvre, including his own theoretical statements on art and the network of affinities with certain aesthetic theories, as well as for a transcendental deduction of the original and practical source of his artistic genius.

Living Language Russian, Essential Edition: Beginner through Advanced course (2013)

Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought, ed. Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Sophus A. Reinert, Richard Whatmore (2018)

When Istvan Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landmark 2005 book Jealousy of Trade, which explores the birth of economic nationalism and other social effects of expanding eighteenth-century markets. Markets, Morals, Politics brings together a celebrated cast of Hont’s contemporaries to assess his influence, ideas and methods.

Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (2017), ed. Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Richard Whatmore

For many Enlightenment thinkers, discerning the relationship between commerce and peace was the central issue of modern politics. This volume showcases the variety and the depth of approaches to economic rivalry and the rise of public finance that characterized Enlightenment discussions of international politics. It presents a fundamental reassessment of these debates about ‘perpetual peace’ and their legacy in the history of political thought.

The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (2011)

This book presents an important new account of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Closed Commercial State, a major early nineteenth-century development of Rousseau and Kant’s political thought. Isaac Nakhimovsky shows how Fichte reformulated Rousseau’s constitutional politics and radicalized the economic implications of Kant’s social contract theory with his defense of the right to work. Nakhimovsky argues that Fichte’s sequel to Rousseau and Kant’s writings on perpetual peace represents a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the pacification of the West.

Effects of U.S. Tax Policy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Nordhaus, William D., Stephen A. Merrill, and Paul T. Beaton, eds (2013)

The U.S. Congress charged the National Academies with conducting a review of the Internal Revenue Code to identify the types of and specific tax provisions that have the largest effects on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions and to estimate the magnitude of those effects. To address such a broad charge, the National Academies appointed a committee composed of experts in tax policy, energy and environmental modeling, economics, environmental law, climate science, and related areas.

The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World (2013)

Climate change is profoundly altering our world in ways that pose major risks to human societies and natural systems. We have entered the Climate Casino and are rolling the global-warming dice, warns economist William Nordhaus. But there is still time to turn around and walk back out of the casino, and in this essential book the author explains how.

Technological Change to Promote a Low Carbon Economy, ed. with Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Energy Economics, Special Issue (2011)

To address the issues involved in the dynamics of technological change to combat global warming, the editors of this special issue convened a pair of workshops on the subject. The workshops were co-hosted by the Energy Modeling Forum summer workshops in Snowmass, Colorado, in August 2008 and August 2009. The workshops addressed key issues from various perspectives: the underlying science and engineering, economic theory, modeling, entrepreneurship, policy instruments, and case studies. The purpose was to develop insights that will help policymakers, analysts, businesses, and governments as they consider various approaches to support technology and policy in this area. The papers in this volume were presented and discussed at both workshops; several of the discussants also prepared remarks, which we have included to provide perspective on the papers. 

The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (2015)

The Yield is a once-in-a-generation reinterpretation of the oeuvre of Franz Kafka. At the same time, it is a powerful new entry in the debates about the supposed secularity of the modern age. Kafka is one of the most admired writers of the last century, but this book presents us with a Kafka few will recognize. It does so through a fine-grained analysis of the three hundred “thoughts” the writer penned near the end of World War I, when he had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Messianic Thought Outside Theology, edited by Anna Glazova and Paul North (2014)

The Problem of Distraction (2011)

We live in an age of distraction. Contemporary analyses of culture, politics, techno-science, and psychology insist on this. They often suggest remedies for it, or ways to capitalize on it. Yet they almost never investigate the meaning and history of distraction itself. This book corrects this lack of attention. It inquires into the effects of distraction, defined not as the opposite of attention, but as truly discontinuous intellect. Human being has to be reconceived, according to this argument, not as quintessentially thought-bearing, but as subject to repeated, causeless blackouts of mind.

“Why are Households that Report the Lowest Incomes So Well‐off?” article in The Economic Journal by Mike Brewer, Ben Etheridge, and Cormac O’Dea (2017)

The authors of this article document that households in the UK with extremely low measured income tend to spend much more than those with merely moderately low income. This phenomenon is evident throughout three decades worth of microdata and across different employment states, levels of education and marital statuses. Of the likely explanations, the authors provide several arguments that discount over‐reporting of expenditure and argue that under‐reporting of income plays the major role.

“Do the rich save more? Evidence from linked survey and administrative data,” article in Oxford Economic Papers by Antoine Bozio, Carl Emmerson, Cormac O’Dea, and Gemma Tetlow (2017)

The nature of the relationship between lifetime income and saving rates is a longstanding empirical question and one that has been surprisingly difficult to answer. The authors use a new data set containing both individual survey data on wealth holdings and administrative data on earnings histories to examine this question. They find, for a sample of English households, evidence of a positive relationship between the rate of private wealth accumulation and levels of lifetime earnings. 

“Discount rate heterogeneity among older households: a puzzle?” article in Journal of Population Economics by Antoine Bozio, Guy Laroque, and Cormac O’Dea (2017)

In this article, the authors put forward a method for estimating discount rates using wealth and income data. They build consumption from these data using the budget constraint. Consumption transitions yield discount rates by household groups. Applying this technique to a sample of older households, the authors find a similar distribution to those previously estimated using field data, though with a much lower mean than those found using experiments. Surprisingly, among this older population, patience is negatively correlated with education and numeracy. This goes against the positive correlation found for younger populations in experiments and some field studies. The authors discuss potential explanations for this result.

“Tocqueville and the Legal Culture of Jacksonian America,” article in Journal of the Early Republic (2019)

Tocqueville and the Legal Basis of Democracy (2014), in Italian

Giulia Oskian’s book Tocqueville and the Legal Basis of Democracy was published in Italian and is now being translated into English. The book rediscovers the philosophy and constitutional theory contained in Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville and illustrates the significant contribution that this work can make to the current debate on the problems of democracy.

The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865 (2019)

Virgil’s Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid (2018)

Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic (2014)

The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (2015)

Published in 2015, The Worldmakers is the first scholarly book to grapple with the challenge of comprehending the modern world by taking the term itself as its primary subject. Looking beyond signs of global transformation and their historical catalysts, the author attens to the conceptual, imaginative and metaphysical challenges posed by the pursuit of a comprehensive global vision in Europe between 1550 and 1700

The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment (2011)

We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry—not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the unceasing improvement of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines moral, political, and economic treatises of the period, and reveals that crucial eighteenth-century texts did find value in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment thinking in the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Siméon Chardin, this book explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, not as a vice of the wretched, but as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to beliefs about virtue and utility.

The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016)

Universal equality is a treasured political concept in France, but recent anxiety over the country’s Muslim minority has led to an emphasis on a new form of universalism, one promoting loyalty to the nation at the expense of all ethnic and religious affiliations. This timely book offers a fresh perspective on the debate by showing that French equality has not always demanded an erasure of differences. Through close and contextualized readings of the way that major novelists, philosophers, filmmakers, and political figures have struggled with the question of integrating Jews into French society, Maurice Samuels draws lessons about how the French have often understood the universal in relation to the particular.

Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader (2013)

Recent scholarship has brought to light the existence of a dynamic world of specifically Jewish forms of literature in the nineteenth century—fiction by Jews, about Jews, and often designed largely for Jews. This volume makes this material accessible to English speakers for the first time, offering a selection of Jewish fiction from France, Great Britain, and the German-speaking world. 

Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2009)

In this book, Maurice Samuels brings to light little known works of literature produced from 1830 to 1870 by the first generation of Jews born as French citizens. These writers, Samuels asserts, used fiction as a laboratory to experiment with new forms of Jewish identity relevant to the modern world. In their stories and novels, they responded to the stereotypical depictions of Jews in French culture while creatively adapting the forms and genres of the French literary tradition. They also offered innovative solutions to the central dilemmas of Jewish modernity in the French context—including how to reconcile their identities as Jews with the universalizing demands of the French revolutionary tradition. While their solutions ranged from complete assimilation to a modern brand of orthodoxy, these writers collectively illustrate the creativity of a community in the face of unprecedented upheaval.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018)

In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us – between equality and oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood – Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015)

In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first.  Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think, and thus all the more terrifying. 

“Misrepresented Interests: Business, Medicare, and the Making of the American Health Care State,” in Studies in American Political Development (2018)

A belief that there is a pervasive and enduring adversarial relationship between business and the welfare state is shared widely across scholarly disciplines engaged in historical and comparative analysis of social politics. According to that view, each stage in the expansion of the American welfare state was a defeat for capitalists. Detailed evidence on the politics of health care, with special focus on the passage of Medicare in 1965, casts serious doubt on this dominant view about class politics, the welfare state, and the power of business.

“Theodorakis Takes on Anagnostakis: Reinventing the Lyric,” in Manolis Anagnostakis: Poetry and Politics, Silence and Agency in Post-War Greece, ed. Vangelis Calotychos (2012)

The book reflects on the life and work of a significant poet, public figure, and influential commentator of the cultural, social, and political history of Greece post-World War II: Manolis Anagnostakis (1925–2005). It considers his oeuvre in relation to the work of his peers and to traditions of writing, both Greek and non-Greek, as it challenges the assumptions and determinations of his critics. 

“Empire, Religious Fanaticism, and Everyman’s Dilemma: Julian the Apostate in Kazantzakis and Cavafy,” in Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2010)

This comparative analysis of Constantine Cavafy’s “Julian” poems and Nikos Kazantzakis’s play Julian the Apostate brings the two works into conversation with each other as well as with current debates about the so-called “clash of civilizations,” “globalization,” and the “war on terror.” In light of fanatical religious rhetoric and violent conflict in the two historical periods—the fourth century A.D. and the present—a revisiting of Kazantzakis’s heroic vision of Julian and Cavafy’s ironic and skeptical treatment may serve to modulate and inform the current discussion by facilitating a more nuanced critique of the assumed manifest destiny of the American polity, the grand narrative of Middle Eastern reformation, the ethical aspirations of and justifications for military action based on religious grounds, as well as the recent employment of rhetoric in political discourse and in what one might call “the theatrics of power.”