New Books in Critical Theory

Marshall Poe

Episodes

Mentioned books

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May 12, 2026 • 44min

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, "The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us" (Liveright Publishing, 2026)

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, philosopher and novelist known for exploring big ideas in culture, returns with a book about the human longing to matter. She traces how mattering shapes identity through stories and psychological, biological, and philosophical lenses. Listens to how different strategies for feeling significant link to creativity, politics, and social conflict.
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May 8, 2026 • 39min

Julia Bowes, "Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Julia Bowes, lecturer in gender history and author of Every Man's Home a Castle, traces how nineteenth‑century fights over schools, vaccines, and labor laws birthed modern parental rights politics. She charts coalitions from immigrants to anti‑vaccine activists and shows why schools became the main battleground for state power. The conversation ranges from legal battles to racial and class exclusions shaping today’s rhetoric.
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May 6, 2026 • 41min

Angela Dimitrakaki, "Feminism. Art. Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2026)

Angela Dimitrakaki, Professor of contemporary art history and theory at the University of Edinburgh, offers a Marxist feminist lens on art and capitalism. She links capitalism to gendered inequalities in art institutions. Discussion covers realism in teaching, technology’s role in labor and subjectivity, market pressures on artistic practice, and tensions between reform and revolutionary change.
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May 4, 2026 • 1h 21min

Alana Lentin, "The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy" (Pluto Books, 2025)

Alana Lentin, Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis and scholar-activist on race and anti-racism. She discusses the backlash against critical race ideas and how it polices education and dissent. She traces the Black radical tradition and Cedric Robinson’s influence. She examines limits of liberal anti-racism, the repurposing of DEI and anti-hate politics, and the politics of historical memory.
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11 snips
May 4, 2026 • 54min

James Q. Whitman, "Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale, traces how legal thought shifted from seeing humans as property to seeing land that way. He explores Roman law metaphors, the rise of territorial states, free-soil doctrines, and how this legal transformation shaped abolition, serfdom, and modern inequality. Short, provocative historical reframing of ownership.
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May 3, 2026 • 1h 17min

Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney eds., "Media Rurality" (Duke UP, 2026)

Burç Köstem, assistant professor studying media and technology, walks the outskirts of Istanbul and traces mega-projects and construction waste. Megan Wiessner, postdoctoral researcher on digital tech and democracy, maps green data capitalism and cases like Microsoft FarmBeats. Patrick Brodie, information scholar, recounts Marconi stations and data centers in rural landscapes. Darin Barney, infrastructure and political economy scholar, ties rural mediation to colonial and capitalist circuits.
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May 2, 2026 • 1h 11min

D. Vance Smith, "Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

D. Vance Smith, Princeton medievalist and author, reclaims Africa as the source of key European cultural texts. He traces African influence on Virgil, Chaucer, and Petrarch. He explores how medieval studies and colonial institutions erased African literacies and reshaped race, law, and museum displays. The conversation moves from medieval links to modern consequences.
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May 2, 2026 • 0sec

Jason R. Young, "The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2026)

Jason R. Young, a historian at the University of Michigan who studies the memory of American slavery, discusses how early twentieth-century Charleston elites manufactured a sanitised plantation myth. He traces how literature, art, performance, and tourism exported and hardened those stereotypes. The conversation highlights archival surprises, preservation politics, and how cultural production shapes public memory and contemporary debates.
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May 1, 2026 • 1h 32min

Mostafa Hussein, "Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mostafa Hussein, assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim studies at the University of Michigan and author of Hebrew Orientalism. He explains how Hebrew thinkers adopted and adapted Arabo-Islamic culture to shape Zionist aims. Short scenes cover language revival, landscape and place-naming, mixed identities of native and immigrant Jews, and the tangled politics of admiration, hierarchy, and coexistence in late Ottoman and British Palestine.
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4 snips
May 1, 2026 • 0sec

Mapping Out Food and Philosophy

Andrea Borghini, associate professor of philosophy and director of Culinary Mind, studies the philosophy of food and modern food systems. He maps why food deserves philosophical attention. He describes transdisciplinary dialogues, the rise of food in culture, the short-essay format used to gather global voices, and future directions for Culinary Mind.

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