New Books in Western European Studies

Richard Bourke, Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, began developing his history of Edmund Burke’s political thought in 1991. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton University Press, 2015) uses Burke as a window into the eighteenth-century articulations of British imperial power, exploring the way...

In Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Megan Thomas offers a thoroughly researched and closely attentive account of how anthropological sciences contributed to the making of the Philippines. While attending to the political concerns that drive Edward Said’s critique of orientalism, Thomas correct...

Why did Michel Foucault radically recast the project of The History of Sexuality? How did he work collaboratively? What was the influence of Antiquity on his thought? In Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity Press, 2016) Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick explores these, and many more, questions about the final years in a rich intellectual life. The boo...

Why were German Jews so fascinated by Iberian Sephardic history? In Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation (Lexington Books, 2015), University of Oklahoma Professor Dr. Carsten Schapkow looks beyond the typical model of German-Jewish assimilation in response to emancipation in German lands a failed model, according to m...

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Sephardi Jews with roots in the Ottoman Empire who sought citizenship within European nations for a variety of reasons, including socio-economic mobil...

Jessica Greenberg’s After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford University Press, 2014) explores a dual tension at work in Serbia in the early 2000s. She reveals young people’s disappointment in what they saw as a betrayal by their parents’ generation that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the failure of democracy in Serbia, as well as adults’...

Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Far from being a product of the postwar environmental movement, Ford shows how French society began to understand how humans adversely affected their surroundings during the eighteenth...

Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis of the languages and preoccupations of French civil society and political culture from the 1970s to the present. Picking up where many historical studies leave off, the book pursues the legacies of the period of France’s Trente Glorieuses, including a n...

You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. All of which is to say we tend to focus on how Europeans got the Middle East wrong, not how the got it right. But, as Anders Ingram points...

Islamophobia, both as a term and concept, has a storied and complicated history, and understanding its many layers in our current historical moment remains important for any number of audiences and purposes. By focusing on contemporary incarnations but also giving historical context, Todd Green accomplishes an admirable task in The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortre...

In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Peter Trawny, professor of philosophy and founder and director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, explores the place of anti-Semitism in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Using Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks, Trawny explains that the philosopher’s anti-Semitism wa...

Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressive study of the economic and political vitality of the forest, from the reign of Louis XIV through the middle of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Franche-Comte region, the book explores the meanings and values of the forest to a range of stakeho...

In The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Jack Jacobs, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center, investigates how the Jewish backgrounds of major Critical Theorists, and the ways in which they related to their origins, impacted upon their work, the history of the Frankfurt School, and differences that emerged...

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: A...

In Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I (NAL Caliber, 2016), National Archives historian and forensic archivist Mitchell Yockelson reappraises the American Expeditionary Force’s performance under the command of General John J. Pershing. Accordingly, the American forces’ combat experience in the September to November 1918 Meuse-Argonne Campa...

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism,...

In his expansive The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800 (Yale University Press, 2015), Daniel Jutte suggests new ways of understanding the scientific revolution of the early modern period through exploring the ways in which Christians and Jews engaged in the exchange of secret knowledge. As opposed to contemporary understandings of secrets as information needin...

Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This is particularly true of the lives of women, which are often, in biography, confined to the marriage plot and detailed as events in the lives of men. As Jessa Crispin writes in her new book, The Dead Ladi...

In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. Arguing that interactions between Jews and Muslims must be understood in and through the respective, changing statuses and relationships of both communities to the French state, The Burdens of Brotherhoo...

How does one “rethink and revise the key concepts of Hannah Arendt’s political theory in light of the struggles of asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants” (207)? In her new book Rightlessness in An Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants (Oxford University Press, 2015), Ayten Gundogdu (Political Science, Barnard College) engages this question to explo...

In Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014), Sven-Erik Rose, Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, explores how Jewish intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century reevaluated Judaism with the tools of German philosophy. That philosophy offered Jews ideas with which to think about the place of Jews in German...

Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th through the 21st century to explore the various forms the Balkan region has taken in Europe’s political and cultural imagination. Her analysis of these literary works reveals concepts of belonging, multi-belo...

At least twice in past interview descriptions I’ve used the famous phrase attributed to Hitler: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” To be honest, I couldn’t have told you much more about the extent of German knowledge of the Armenian genocide and its aftermath. After reading Stefan Ihrig’s wonderful new book Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bisma...

In Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (University of Illinois, 2015), Kenyon Zimmer, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas, Arlington, examines the anarchist movements and ideas of immigrants to the United States from the 1880’s through the 1940’s. Using sources in half a dozen different languages, Zimmer builds an in-depth picture of these m...

How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Studies and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, explores are range of examples to probe the decade of Right Wing government between 2002 and 2012. Drawing on the implicit/explicit distinct...