With From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2024), Susan Grunewald significantly enhances understandings of the fate of Germans captured by the Soviet Union during World War II. Her archival research demonstrates that the Soviets saw the German prisoners of war as a source of labor at a time when the Soviet Union urgently needed to rebuild and lacked manpower after its enormous war losses. Numerous Soviet enterprises, operating under dozens of ministries, used POWs contracted out by prison camp officials. Grunewald argues that the mistreatment of German POWs and their high death rates were the consequence not of retribution but of negligence, lack of coordination, and severe shortages, especially during the famine that followed the war. Those too weak to work were often repatriated. POWs were also subjected to intense antifascist reeducation so that once home, they would help win support among Germans for the Soviet Union; many former prisoners filled leadership roles in East Germany after the establishment of two German states in 1949. The last POWs returned to Germany in early 1956.
In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge between three successive sets of arguments: between the supporters of the ancients and moderns, the classics and romantics, and the Romans and the Germans. Sonenscher argues that the genealogy of modern political ideologies—from liberalism to nationalism to communism—can be connected to the resulting discussions of time, history, and values, mainly in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, in the period straddling the French and Industrial revolutions.
What is the genuinely human content of human history? Everything begins somewhere—democracy with the Greeks, or the idea of a res publica with the Romans—but these local arrangements have become vectors of values that are, apparently, universal. The intellectual upheaval that Sonenscher describes involved a struggle to close the gap, highlighted by Kant, between individual lives and human history. After Kant is an examination of that struggle’s enduring impact on the history and the historiography of political thought.
Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Before the Deluge (Princeton), Sans-Culottes (Princeton), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
G.W.F. Hegel was widely seen as the greatest philosopher of his age. Ever since, his work has shaped debates about issues as varied as religion, aesthetics and metaphysics. His most lasting contribution was his vision of history and politics. In Hegel’s World Revolutions(Princeton UP, 2023), Richard Bourke returns to Hegel’s original arguments, clarifying their true import and illuminating their relevance to contemporary society. Bourke shows that central to Hegel’s thought was his anatomy of the modern world. On the one hand he claimed that modernity was a deliverance from subjection, but on the other he saw it as having unleashed the spirit of critical reflection. Bourke explores this predicament in terms of a series of world revolutions that Hegel believed had ushered in the rise of civil society and the emergence of the constitutional state.
Bourke interprets Hegel’s thought, with particular reference to his philosophy of history, placing it in the context of his own time. He then recounts the reception of Hegel’s political ideas, largely over the course of the twentieth century. Countering the postwar revolt against Hegel, Bourke argues that his disparagement by major philosophers has impoverished our approach to history and politics alike. Challenging the condescension of leading thinkers—from Heidegger and Popper to Lévi-Strauss and Foucault—the book revises prevailing views of the relationship between historical ideas and present circumstances
Richard Bourke is professor of the history of political thought and a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of a number of books, including Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton).
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were hired to work for newly formed government agencies to get the new republic quickly on its feet. But there was an enormous flaw in the plan: no serious vetting system was put in place to keep war criminals out of government positions.
As discussed in Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) by Terrence Petty, ex-Nazis—people who had been involved in mass murder, drafting antisemitic laws, and the persecution of Hitler’s opponents, as well as other depravities—resumed their careers without consequence in the newly created Federal Republic of Germany. Former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These “Persil Certificates,” named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi’s recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, and a whole generation of German government officials with Nazi pasts was never brought to account.
Ex-Nazis were given preference for government jobs even over victims of Nazi policies and anti-Hitler resisters. They swapped Nazi uniforms for suits, Hitler salutes for handshakes. And with help from the highest levels of West German government and even the CIA, they swept their crimes under the carpet and resurrected their careers. Nazis at the Watercooler illuminates the network of ex–Third Reich loyalists and the U.S. government’s complicity that enabled this mass impunity.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature(Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them.
By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited.
Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books.
Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network.
In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we are privileged to join a profound conversation between Robert P. George and Cornel West, two towering figures in political philosophy and social thought. Their discussion, based on their collaborative work Truth Matters, models what robust intellectual engagement and civil discourse can look like, especially when addressing issues that divide Americans today.
In this thought-provoking episode, George and West explore the concept of truth and its centrality to our personal and collective lives. They tackle critical questions surrounding truth’s role in the public square, and how we, as a society, can navigate the growing challenges to free expression and intellectual inquiry.
Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.
Clinician and psychoanalyst Jan Abram proposes and elaborates the dual concept of an intrapsychic surviving and non surviving object. She extends Winnicottian technique by highlighting the centrality of the analysand playing with the object. Across eight chapters she develops this theory of survival, while also exploring the terror of non-survival, and its implications for psychic health, the fear of WOMAN as underlying misogny; Winnicott's theory of desire; and the role of the father as part of a paternal integrate. Abram draws on the work of André Green and Thomas Ogden, and also makes use of a Japanese ukiyo-e to visualize her argument.
This is an extraordinary volume on Winnicottian metapsychlogy by its foremost scholar, opening up some of the lesser known aspects of Winnicott's work. The Surviving Object: Psychoanalytic Clinical Essays on Psychic Survival-Of-The-Object (Routledge, 2021) transcends an established context of reference that emphasizes holding, by honing in on questions of formlessness, the significance of survival, and the incommunicado core. Furthermore, Abram asserts the intrapsychic dimension of the surviving object, thereby crucially rectifying the view that Winnicottian clinical practice is purely interpersonal.
After years of research, journalist Kathleen Lippa has written about the shocking crimes of a trusted teacher who wrought lasting damage on Inuit communities: Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada’s North (Dundurn Press, February 2025). In the 1970s, a young schoolteacher from British Columbia was becoming the darling of the Northwest Territories education department with his dynamic teaching style. He was learning to speak the local language, Inuktitut, something few outsiders did. He also claimed to be Indigenous — a claim that would later prove to be false. In truth, Edward Horne was a pedophile who sexually abused his male students. From 1971 to 1985 his predations on Inuit boys would disrupt life in the communities where he worked — towns of close-knit families that would suffer the intergenerational trauma created by his abuse. In this book, Kathleen examines the devastating impact the crimes had on individuals, families, and entire communities. Her compelling work lifts the veil of silence surrounding the Horne story once and for all.
More about Kathleen Lippa:
Kathleen Lippa is a Canadian journalist, born in Toronto and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Kathleen trained as a professional dancer at The Quinte Ballet School and The School of the Toronto Dance Theatre before embarking on a journalism career. At Memorial University, from which she graduated with a BA (English) in 1998, she worked on the student newspaper, the muse. Following graduation, she worked at a number of Canadian newspapers including The Express (St. John’s) where she won a Canadian Community Newspaper Association award for arts reporting, The Hanover Post (Ontario), a number of newspapers under the corporate umbrella of the Northern News Services, 24 Hours (Toronto), and the Calgary Sun. For Northern News Services, after a short stint in Yellowknife, Kathleen served as Bureau Chief in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Her experience includes writing, editing, page layout and design, and photography. Her Northern experience was in a cross-cultural setting primarily reporting news from Inuit communities. After spending many years in Iqaluit, Kathleen now lives with her husband in Ottawa and St. John’s.
About Hollay Ghadery:
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.
Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte's groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the greatest culprit in America's quality-of-life crisis: the way our economy and culture conceive of work. Americans across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion, burnout, and the wish for more meaningful lives. This full-system failure in our structure of work affects everything from gender inequality to domestic stability, and it even shortens our lifespans.
Drawing on years of research, Schulte traces the arc of our discontent from a time before the 1980s, when work was compatible with well-being and allowed a single earner to support a family, until today, with millions of people working multiple hourly jobs or in white-collar positions where no hours are ever off duty.
She casts a wide net in search of solutions, exploring the movement to institute a four-day workweek, introducing Japan's Housewives Brigade--which demands legal protection for family time--and embedding with CEOs who are making the business case for humane conditions. And she demonstrates the power of a collective and creative demand for change, showing that work can be organized in an infinite number of ways that are good for humans and for business.
Brigid Schulte is the author of the bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and an award-winning journalist formerly for the Washington Post, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize. She is also the director of the Better Life Lab, the work-family justice and gender equity program at New America.
One of the twentieth century's great paleontologists and science writers, Stephen Jay Gould was, for Bruce S. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, also a close colleague and friend. In Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paleontology, and Stephen Jay Gould (Columbia UP, 2024), they take up the tradition of Gould's acclaimed essays on natural history, offering a series of wry and insightful reflections on the fields to which they have devoted their careers.
Lieberman and Eldredge explore the major features of evolution, or "macroevolution," examining key issues in paleontology and their links to popular culture, philosophy, music, and the history of science. They focus on topics such as punctuated equilibria, mass extinctions, and the history of life--with detours including trilobites, Hollywood stuntmen, coywolves, birdwatching, and New Haven-style pizza. Lieberman and Eldredge's essays showcase their deep knowledge of the fossil record and keen appreciation of the arts and culture while touching on different aspects of Gould's life and work. Ultimately, they show why Gould's writings and perspective are still relevant today, following his lead in using the natural history essay to articulate their view of evolutionary theory and its place in contemporary life. At once thought-provoking and entertaining, Macroevolutionaries is for all readers interested in paleontology, evolutionary biology, and Gould's literary and scientific legacy.
