David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl (eds.), Aby Warburg 150: Work, Legacy, Promise – De Gruyter, April 2024 Cover of the book, with Melancholia I by Albrecht Dürer (1514) Aby Warburg is regarded as one of the great pioneers of modern cultural studies. This book brings together texts by many of the most renowned researchers in the field who have been influenced by his work. They address his extraordinary impact on the understanding of cultural transmission and the influence of images and texts across time and space. What emerges is the continuing significance of Warburg for our own times ..read more

Some books I’ve mentioned here recently – Philippe Chevallier, Michel Foucault et le christianisme: Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée; Michael C. Behrent, Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years; Federico Testa (ed.), Canguilhem beyond Epistemology and the History of Science – a special issue of Revue Internationale de Philosophie; and Burak Kadercan, Shifting Grounds: The Social Origins of Territorial Conflict – and older books by Bloch and Febvre, Barthes and Koyré. The publisher sent a copy of Philippe’s book, on his request; the Behrent is to review; I have a ..read more

Eduardo Mendieta, The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism – SUNY Press, June 2024 – part of the SUNY Press Open Access series Humans are animals who fictionalize other animals to asse their “humanness.” We are philosophical animals who philosophize about our humanity by projecting images onto a mirror about other animals. Spanning literature, philosophy, and ethics, the thread uniting The Philosophical Animal is the bestiary and how it continues to inform our imaginings. Beginning with an exploration of animals and women in the literary work of Coet ..read more

Ben Clift, The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governance – Oxford University Press, March 2023 The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governanceis about the politics of economic ideas and technocratic economic governance. It is also a book about the changing political economy of British capitalism’s relationship to the European and wider global economies. It focuses on the creation in 2010 and subsequent operation of the independent body created to oversee fiscal rectitude in Britain, the Office for Budget Re ..read more

Jo van Every, ‘You don’t have to start with an abstract‘ Some interesting discussion, particularly in terms of highlighting multiple ways to work, rather than a single way to begin. Do you use conferences as a way to start new writing projects? In my experience it’s a pretty common practice. You are working on some research. You need to transition into the writing phase. A conference offers an impetus to make a decision about what you might write and get some kind of reasonable draft in order. After the conference, you can revise it into an article or book chapter. There is lots to like about ..read more

 “The Architectural Gift,” a conversation between architectural historian Łukasz Stanek and Places editor Frances Richard House of Culture and Youth Theatre Complex in Darkhan, Mongolia, designed by L. Kataev, E. Antipova, and V. Shifrin, 1978. A gift of the Soviet Union to what was then the Mongolian People’s Republic. Photographed in 2018. [Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by Łukasz Stanek] Gifted buildings are potent mechanisms of geopolitical reshuffling, premised on an uneven power relation between giver and receiver. How do such exchanges shape cities in trans ..read more

Matthew Beaumont, How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body – Verso, March 2024 You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait reflect our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers, his book explores the relationship between freedom and the human body How We Walk foregrounds the work of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of libe ..read more

Andy Merrifield, “Gramsci and his friend ‘S’“ A post exploring the generational links between Merrifield, David Harvey, Piero Sraffa and Antonio Gramsci. I was in New York recently, where I once lived, some twenty-years back, there to visit my old friend and mentor, my old university teacher—and now he is old—an 88-year-old David Harvey, the world-renowned Marx scholar. I hadn’t seen him for a while and was keen to catch up, to hear his news and tell him some of my own, about my life in Rome, about my work on Gramsci. Ever so brilliant, it’s good to get some tips from David, some i ..read more

It’s Immanuel Kant’s 300th birthday today. I’ve not written much on Kant, but he was the topic of perhaps my favourite of the essay collections I’ve edited or co-edited – Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Reading Kant’s Geography, SUNY Press, 2011. Eduardo and I discussed the idea and while we realised we couldn’t write the book together, we did know or know of the people who could. We brought many of them together for workshops in New York and Durham. It’s very much a book I think of as one by many hands – not just a collection of pieces on a theme, but one where the pieces fit togeth ..read more

Nicholas Terpstra, Senses of Space in the Early Modern World – Cambridge University Press, February 2024 (print and open access) New Books discussion with Miranda Melcher How did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those experiences and further shape them  This Element takes an approach that is both global expansive and locally rooted by focusing on four cities as key examples: Florence, Amsterdam, Boston, and Manila. They relate to distinct parts of European cultural and coloniali ..read more