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Meta-Theory, with Brendan Graham Dempsey
Today I sit down with Brendan Graham Dempsey, Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, where he thinks about human meaning-making systems. It’s rare that I have someone on the pod who doesn’t specialize in Asian traditio
Orson Welles: Revised and Expanded 3rd Edition with Joseph McBride (Sticking Place Books, 2026)
Orson Welles is a foundational work of Welles criticism. First published by Joseph McBride in the British Film Institute's Cinema One series in 1972 when the author was twenty-four, it now has been extensively revised and updated to reflect
The Invisibility Of Religion In Contemporary Art with Jonathan A. Anderson and James Elkins
In this episode of the Books for Better Understanding series from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson hosts Jonathan A. Anderson and James Elkins for a discussion of Anderson's new book, The Invisibility Of Religion In Contemporary Art (U Notre
An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class with Ewan Gibbs (Verso, 2026)
Whatever happened to the working class? A compelling new social history of Britain since 1945 From the picket lines of the Miners' Strike to the Amazon warehouses of today, the British working class has been pushed from the center of politi
Subalterns and the State with Lisa Mitchell and Hari Ramesh
This episode features a conversation with historical anthropologist Lisa Mitchell and political theorist Hari Ramesh whose recent books make a case against anti-state thinking in social and political theory. We discussed the need to move be
Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe with John Callanan (Princeton UP, 2025)
In 1714, doctor, philosopher and writer Bernard Mandeville published The Fable of the Bees, a humorous tale in which a prosperous hive full of greedy and licentious bees trade their vices for virtues and immediately fall into economic and s
In Pursuit of the Inconceivable: An Investigation of Metaphysics and Mysticism with Peter G. Jones (Essentia Books, 2025)
In Pursuit of the Inconceivable: An Investigation of Metaphysics and Mysticism (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781803419060) (Essentia Books, 2025) is a compelling exploration of fundamental questions about existence, reality, and the meanin
Once Upon a Time in South Central LA: John Singleton's Hood Trilogy with Mark D. Cunningham (UP of Mississippi, 2026)
After the groundbreaking success of his debut film, Boyz N the Hood in 1991, filmmaker John Singleton (1968–2019) gained worldwide acclaim, earned the respect of major film industry figures, and became the topic of both scholarly and popula
Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public with Keegan Cook Finberg (Columbia UP, 2025)
What is the place of poetry in the modern world? In Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia UP, 2025), Keegan Cook Finberg (https://bsky.app/profile/keegancf.bsky.social), an Associate Professor of English (https://ke
Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs with Michael Doan (AK Press, 2026)
In Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781849356145) (AK Press, 2026), Michael Doan explores the work and legacy of James and Grace Lee Boggs, two of the most influenti
Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan with Maxime Polleri (NYU Press, 2026)
The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment
No! The Art and Activism of Complaining
To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781558613683), her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Sara Ahmed attunes he
In Praise of Agnes Heller (1929-2019)
Agnes Heller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81gnes_Heller) loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its
Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space with Amanda Batarseh (Syracuse UP, 2026)
A Conversation with the author Amanda Batarseh about Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780815612223) (Syracuse UP, 2026). Present in the heart of modern Palestinian literature is a per
First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism with Teresa M. Bejan (Harvard UP, 2026)
Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from us, politically and otherwise—is far from obvious. Does it mean
Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block with Talitha LeFlouria (Beacon Press, 2022)
In Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780807003930) (Beacon Press, 2022), historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the
In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology with Thomas Fuchs (Oxford UP, 2021)
At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer conception of the human person. Rather than view
Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy with Roger T. Ames (SUNY Press, 2025)
Contrasts classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with Confucian "zoetology" ("the art of living"). In Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781438499529) (SUNY Press, 20
God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology with N Gray Sutanto (Bloomsbury, 2024)
God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780567709011)(Bloomsbury, 2024)is the first book to apply Bavinck's theological anthropology to contemporary theological issues. Sutanto provides a
Realism After the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel with Rafael Walker (U Chicago Press, 2025)
The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisdom—is entrench a liberal model of the individual: the self as autonomo
Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience with Laurence J. Kirmayer (Cambridge UP, 2025)
It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience (https://bookshop.org/a/12343
Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism with Julia Bailey (U Illinois Press, 2026)
The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset that pitted the USSR’s state-sponsored Socialist Realism against its so-
An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa with Elisa Prosperetti (Cambridge UP, 2026)
In An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781009618625) (Cambridge UP, 2026), Elisa Prosperetti argues that while racialized, colonial notions of develo
Working with Critical Realism: Stories of Methodological Encounters with Alpesh Maisuria and Grant Banfield (Routledge, 2022)
Working with Critical Realism: Stories of Methodological Encounters (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781032045634) (Routledge, 2022) is an international and interdisciplinary collection that gathers stories from researchers and research stude
To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian with Zahi Zalloua (Bloomsbury, 2026)
In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, "How does it feel to be a problem?" In this profound response to that question, Zahi Zalloua endeavours to think through the shared Black and Palesti
Think of England: Nation, People, and Race in the English Imagination with Paul Kléber Monod (Cambridge UP, 2026)
What is the basis of English national identity? How has this changed over time, and what is its future? Tracing the history of English identity over more than 2,000 years, Think of England: Nation, People, and Race in the English Imaginatio
Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children with Stacey Patton (Beacon Press, 2026)
A powerful, unsettling, and unflinching exploration that forces readers to confront lynching as a devastating legacy of white childhood conditioning, and to reckon with the corrupting force of a system that trained children to become its wi
The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice with Federica Coppola (Cambridge UP, 2026)
The Real Pain of Pu n ishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781009255394) (Cambridge UP, 2026) highlights the concept of 'belonging' as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogat
Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order with Sasikumar Sundaram (Columbia UP, 2026)
Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global pol
Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism with Jeffrey Champlin (U Toronto Press, 2025)
Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781487553807) (U Toronto Press, 2025) examines the deep historical roots of fundamentalism in Protestantism and the imaginative traditions of Romantic literature. It
