Category What We’re Reading

Derek: I recommend teaching Ann Fabian’s The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago, 2010) in your undergraduate seminars. It’s exemplary in showing, not telling, the history of early racial science in the U.S. within the broad and… Continue Reading →

Pranav: Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France Ruth Harris’s account of the infamous Dreyfus affair is one of the most harrowing but meaningful books that I have read in a long… Continue Reading →

Simon Commentators in contemporary British politics evoke “The Welfare State” so often that you’d think everyone knew what it meant. Today its use often accompanies a story of decline, a lament for the dismantling of the Welfare State, or a… Continue Reading →

Sarah From childhood we have all been warned against ‘judging a book by its cover.’ I suppose then that I should be somewhat ashamed that I first picked up Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) precisely… Continue Reading →

  Derek David W. Blight, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). I don’t think that the Civil War (1861-1865) has ever been quiescent in American culture and popular… Continue Reading →

Derek When James Madison died in 1836—last of the men present at the 1787 convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution—his Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 fell into the hands of Dolley Madison, his wife, to be… Continue Reading →

Andrew This month I’ve been re-reading Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, Peter E. Gordon’s brilliant intellectual-historical overview of the famous Cassirer- Heidegger disputation at the International Davos Conference in 1929. While writing my PhD thesis, I drew heavily on the… Continue Reading →

Disha: Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin is a work of political and literary theory that re-interprets the axes and language of past and present as experienced by settlers and Native peoples in the Americas…. Continue Reading →

Here are some highlights from what our editors have been reading this month—with another installment next weekend. Let us know what you’ve been reading, or if one of your favorites is here. Sarah Elaine Mokhtefi moved to Paris from New York… Continue Reading →