De Gruyter Brill on the Wire

Populism has been at the center of academic and non-academic discussions over the past century and one may argue that there has been an upsurge in populist movements in recent times, often with prominent religious ideals determining the course of political thought. Is populism, then, the source of politics in religion, or does political theology beat at the heart of populism? In this episode, Dr....

The Diplomatic Enlightenment: Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation (Brill, 2021) reconfigures the study of the origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire. Challenging dominant interpretations of the period, this book shows that early eighteenth-century Spanish authors turned to Enlightenment ideas to reinvent Spain’s role in the European balance of power. And while international law g...

The emergence of self-government in the Jewish community in Eastern Europe has been a slow process, often encouraged by invitations of existing regimes and sometimes to escape state persecution. Nonetheless, the Jewish community has succeeded in establishing its autonomy as well as maintain a certain degree of control over its traditions. In this new episode, François Guesnet, Professor of Modern...

How should we understand identity? What sort of politics are needed to address various forms of oppression and marginalization? Are knowledge and practice untainted by ideological obfuscation possible? These questions and many more are what animate my guest today, Himani Bannerji, here to discuss her book The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender (Brill, 2020). Clockin...

The Pandemic led to a massive shift in the course of education as the world was forced to switch to distance learning. And with a new model comes new barriers, whether institutional, pedagogical, technical, or personal. These need to be solved through inclusive and strategic planning, comprehensive support infrastructure, collaboration among stakeholders, modern digital tools, and the creation of...

The pandemic has rapidly changed the world, making it one rife with online activity and information abundance. Education systems must be modified to match this new world. It must cater to the entrepreneurial, competitive, and independent generation that thrives in this world. In this podcast, Susana Gonçalves and Suzanne Majhanovich discuss their book Pandemic, Disruption and Adjustment in Higher...

Formal education became widespread only as recently as the end of the 19th century, as a way to train people for jobs created by the boom in industrialization. Today, with most of those jobs phasing out, world politics radically changing at both the individual and macro levels, diverse cultures and disciplines increasingly coming together as communities, and the pandemic catalyzing a global move t...

Education is one of our main weapons in the fight against climate change. The need of the hour, therefore, is to enhance the world’s commitment to climate education, and incorporate climate change into our education systems. In a special episode that combines two of our ongoing themed series, Survival by Degrees and Quality Education, Radhika Iyengar and Christina T. Kwauk, co-editors of the book ...

The account of the exodus of Israel out of Egypt led by Moses has shaped the theology and community identity of both Jewish people and Christians across the centuries, blossoming further in later scriptures and religious writings, as well as in art and music. Join us as we speak with Joshua Coutts about the book, Let My People Go: The Reception of Exodus Motifs in Jewish and Christian Literature,...

Over the past few years and especially now— with COVID-19-related lockdowns necessitating that families stay at home—an increasing number of parents have chosen to home-school their children. This choice stems from several reasons: political views and distrust in the education system; anxiety about their children’s safety; or simply as an expression of their right to freedom. In the newest episode...

With radical changes being engineered in society, education systems everywhere need to match up. As part of our podcast, Humanities Matter, the all-new series, Quality Education, looks at ways to improve these systems. Higher education has traditionally been viewed as a privilege affordable to only specific strata of society, mainly higher income groups. However, this trend is now changing, with g...

This volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a...

The global trends of increasing climate change are predicted to intensify over the next few decades. General consensus remains that climate change is caused by actions of various entities at various levels, and it is nearly universally accepted that it is morally unacceptable. However, who does the onus of taking action against climate change lie with? In the fourth episode of our new themed serie...

‘Ecumenism’ and ‘independency’ suggest two distinct impulses in the history of Christianity: the desire for unity, co-operation, connectivity, and shared belief and practice, and the impulse for distinction, plurality, and contextual translation. Yet ecumenism and independency are better understood as existing in critical tension with one another. They provide a way of examining changes in World C...

On this episode, I have the great pleasure of finally getting to talk with one of the “unsung heroes” of cybernetics, whose work has finally begun to receive the critical attention it has long deserved, and upon which I have leaned quite heavily in my own work since I entered this field. With Cybernetics for the Social Sciences, out from Brill in 2021, Bernard Scott has met a long-felt need by aut...

The lives of ancient Egyptians were truly colorful, and of them, the royals led the most vivid lives. The military pharaohs have left behind many records that give us a glimpse into their warfare style and accounts. In this new episode, Anthony John Spalinger, Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Auckland, paints a captivating picture of the pharaoh court, based...

The Hungarian Marxist philosopher George Lukács has long occupied a complicated place in the Marxist canon of thinkers, both his lived and theoretical practice subject to much critical commentary and debate. While History and Class Consciousness is considered to be a classic of critical sociology, it has also often been held at arms length by Marxists, many of whom find it’s use of Hegelian specul...

Oceans are inextricably linked to the climate. Today, oceans are warming far more rapidly than they have in the past 65 million years, placing the spotlight on the important nexus between climate change and the ocean. While there’s no doubt that climate change affects all people across the board, its effect is manifold among socioeconomically vulnerable communities, and among women in particular....

An Introductory Sanskrit Reader: Improving Reading Fluency (Brill, 2021) aims to help students start reading original Sanskrit literature. When we study ancient languages, there often is quite a gap between introductory, grammar-based classes and independent reading of original texts. This Reader bridges that gap by offering complete grammar and vocabulary notes for 40 entertaining, thought-provok...

The phrase, “state of nature”, has been used over centuries to describe the uncultivated state of lands and animals, nudity, innocence, heaven and hell, interstate relations, and the locus of pre- and supra-political rights, such as the right to resistance, to property, to create and leave polities, and the freedom of religion, speech, and opinion, which may be reactivated or reprioritised when th...

Social and political conditions, in association with the self, can hardly be explained by one factor. Instead, they are shaped by several factors in diverse, mutually influencing ways. This is the essence of intersectionality, a concept that helps us understand the complexity of the human experience. In the third episode of our new themed series Across the Rainbow, catch us in discussion with Dr....

Marxism is having a moment; higher workloads, stagnating wages, rising costs of living, a new economic crisis every few years, a warming climate and now almost two years of a worldwide pandemic have all led to a number of people across the world, especially younger people, to self-identify with ideas once thought to be in the dustbin of history. But while people may find Marx’s theories helpful fo...

In May 2021, a landmark court order from a district court in the Netherlands ruled that Royal Dutch Shell, one of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world, needs to reduce its CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030. How did a court in the Netherlands pass a ruling on a global company? Does the Paris Agreement hold for transnational private entities like Shell? What does this mean for corporations goin...

An An Ise monogatari Reader: Contexts and Receptions (Brill, 2021) is the first collection of essays in English on The Ise Stories, a canonical literary text ranked beside The Tale of Genji. Eleven scholars from Japan, North America, and Europe explore the historical and political context in which this literary court romance was created, or relate it to earlier works such as the Man’yōshū and late...

As we see in the news every day, climate change is already upon us. The climate crisis is no longer a bridge to be crossed in the future. It must be dealt with today. In this first episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees, Dr. Nicolas Graham describes the influence of fossil fuels in sustaining our unending quest for economic growth and profit. He also highlights the drastic changes ne...