What does humankind’s ancient history have to do with our current existential predicaments? With millions of new refugees seeking to…
Play astronauts and actual refugees
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
History is full of people with ideas
According to Graeber and Wengrow, European elites did not embrace naturalism and empiricism in their accounts of human history to…
Indigenous refusals and near others
Refusal is shorthand for saying, “We’ve seen this before and we don’t want it; and not only don’t we want…
A Middle Eastern indigenous critique?
…I ask how Dawn might help us to think of the Americas and the Middle East together. What is to…
Asking good questions
Dawn dismantles the social science edifice that makes it possible to think that the question “What are the origins of inequality?”…
Experimental books—An introduction
In 2019, Liane Carlson wrote about a dying field (hers, the philosophy of religion). Its death arrived more rapidly than…
Brilliance and complexity: Publishing Lata Mani’s Myriad Intimacies
Lata Mani has been an intellectual hero of mine since before I became an editor at Duke University Press. I…
Sacred experiments, intimate politics
On walks between writing, when I pass the California poppies, I let them press into my mind, remembering a poem…
Myriad Intimacies and feminist political imagination
I read Myriad Intimacies with joy and wonder. It is a beautiful book that frames itself as an offering, rather…
Thinking with form, playing with genre
Myriad Intimacies experiments with form and genre to enact a mode of thinking about interrelations. Its core argument is that…