In Theory: The JHI Blog Podcast

How did a pan-continental vision of “Latin America” emerge and intersect with changing ideas of the nation-state among leftists in Latin America in the interwar years? What impact did the Mexican Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution have on the aspirational visions and political projects of social transformation within the region? How does one conceptualize and, subsequently, write a transnatio...

Samuel Rutherford—a Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History and the History of Sexuality at the University of Glasgow and a founding editor of the JHI Blog—returns to the Blog to speak with Disha Karnad Jani about his book Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939 (2025). In this conversation, Rutherford discusses how English and Scottish colleges and universities from...

In this interview with Disha Karnad Jani for the In Theory podcast, Edward Baring returns to the JHI Blog to offer another discussion of his most recent work, Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931 (2025). Their conversation covers the book’s main focus on “vulgar Marxism” and how this idea serves as a unique entry point into understanding the relati...

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Tejas Parasher about his first book, Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this work, Parasher incorporates, but also looks beyond, the conventional cast of activists and thinkers who proved pivotal to the anticolonial struggle in India during the twentieth century. And, in so doing, he...

On this episode of In Theory, Durba Mitra returns to the podcast to talk with Disha Karnad Jani about her new book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026). In this canon-expanding study, Mitra explores the writings and work of women in the decolonizing world during the mid-to-late twentieth century, and how these women sou...

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Isadora Moura Mota about her recent book, "Freedom's Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). In shifting the periodization of the history of abolition in Brazil from the 1870s and 1880s to the 1840s and 1860s, Mota recenters the intellectual contributions of the enslaved in this t...

For this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Esmat Elhalaby about his first book, "Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization" (University of California Press, 2025), which offers a pathbreaking perspective on the under-explored relationship between Arab and Indian intellectuals throughout the twentieth century and the era of decolonization. Their con...

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Ahmad Shokr about his monograph, "Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt" (Stanford University Press, 2025). In "Harvests of Liberation," Shokr examines Egyptian decolonization through one of the nation’s most valuable commodities: cotton. In so doing, he weaves a history comprised of various strands and...

In this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quinn Slobodian on his latest book, "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" (Zone Books, 2025). Here, Slobodian looks to the likes of Murray Rothbard, Charles Murray, and Javier Milei and their (mis)readings of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to reveal the entangled relationship between neoliberalism after t...

In this most recent episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sophia Rosenfeld about her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her book explores how the idea of making a choice from a menu of options arranged by someone else became synonymous with what it meant to be free between the early modern period and the 20th century, vi...

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quentin Skinner on his new book Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge University Press, 2025). In this book, Skinner traces how liberty as a political ideal became tied to independence and the absence of coercion through the political upheavals of early modern England, debates about absolute monarchy, the American Revolution,...

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sam Klug about his new book The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In this book, Klug explores how the process of decolonization in the 1940s–70s transformed US debates about the role of race in American life, via the analogy of the “internal colony.” The com...

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Stephen Legg about his new book, "Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities" (University of Georgia Press, 2025). In the book, Legg provides a study of Indian anti-colonialism in the decades before Independence that foregrounds the spatially-mediated and bottom-up politics of old and New Delhi’s poor, its middle cla...

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Kevin Pham, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, about his recent book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024).  In his book, Pham traces the evolution of Vietnamese political thought through six figures, Phan Bội Châu, Phan Chu Trinh, Nguyễn An Ninh, Phạm Quỳnh, Hồ Chí Minh, a...

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Asheesh Kapur Siddique, assistant professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, about his recent book, "The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World" (Yale University Press, 2024).  Siddique examines how early modern British administrators ushered in a new kind of in...

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, Oxford about her new book, "Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War" (Basic Books, 2025), also available in German as "Für die Freiheit: Der Bauernkrieg 1525" (trans. Holger Fock and Sabine Müller, S. Fischer Verlage, 2024). In this new history of this massive ev...

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Marc-William Palen, Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024).  Palen begins his story in the 1840s, and shows how over a century of left-wing activists, politicians, and scholars imagined ways to transform the world thro...

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Robert Darnton, Professor Emeritus and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard University, about his recent book, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 (W. W. Norton, 2024), also published in French translation: L'humeur révolutionnaire: Paris, 1748-1789 (trans. Hélène Borraz, Gallimard, 2024).  Darnton traces how the antecede...

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Umut Özsu, Professor in the Department of Law and Legalities at Carleton University, about his book Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960-82 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book shows how jurists from the Third World transformed international law during post-1945 decolonization, and traces the le...

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Camille Robcis, Professor of History and French at Columbia University about her recent book Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Robcis traces how the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, together with his colleagues and patients in the village of St...

Luke Wilkinson interviews Henrike Lähnemann, Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the University of Oxford, to discuss her and Eva Schlotheuber's new book 'The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents' (Open Book Publishers, 2024). They discuss the ideas that circulated through the sounds and spaces of medieval German convents.

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, about her new book "Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution" (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Daut draws out the influential concepts transformed by 18th and 19th century Haitian thinkers writing during and in the immediate aftermath of the r...

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Tehila Sasson, Assistant Professor of Britain and the World in the Department of History at Emory University. In this interview, the author discusses her new book The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024). Sasson shows how British nonprofits sought to create an ethical capitalism in the decades im...

Historian and In Theory editor Disha Karnad Jani interviews Charisse Burden-Stelly about her new book, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023). The book explores how related panics about Black political power and communism in the early 20th century drove the US government’s attempts at repression of anti-capitalist and anti-racis...

Historian and In Theory editor Disha Karnad Jani interviews Anjali Arondekar, Professor of Feminist Studies at California University of California, Santa Cruz and Founding Director of the Center for South Asian Studies about her recently published book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023).