Best Dead Souls Network Podcasts (2025)

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Quinn Slobodian and Philip J. Stern on Political Economy 1:03:52

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• Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated. The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2023), by. • Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Penguin, 2023). Adam Smith wrote that, “Political economy belongs to no nation; it is of no country: it …

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Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025) 43:34

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China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “Global South.” But there were periods where things seemed a bit rosier. For about a decade, between 1988 and 1998, relations between India and China thawed—and prompted heady predictions of an Asian cent…

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Patrick McCartney, "Authenticity, Legitimacy and the Transglobal Yoga Industry: A Sociological Analysis of Shanti Mandir" (Routledge, 2025) 34:58

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This book is a sociological study of knowledge and knowers and explores the production and perceived value of 'yogic knowledge', how distinction is curated, and how access to this knowledge is gained. The book focuses on the organization Shanti Mandir (SM) in India, a new religious movement, which was founded in 1987 by Swami Nityananda Saraswati. …

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Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025) 50:52

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In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the …

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Joseph Torigian, "The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping" (Stanford UP, 2025) 1:42:59

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Often I will find in a chronology or a biography, you know, official materials, evidence that because I have other evidence, it’s meaningful in a way that maybe the people who edited those collections might not have expected. That’s the idea of mosaic theory – you bring together many pieces of evidence, even small ones, to bring the full meaning ou…

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Karen Swan, "The Midnight Secret" (Macmillan, 2025) 47:58

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Keeping details straight while writing a chronologically organized series is difficult enough. Focusing four full-length novels on the events of a single group experience in a single year, with back stories and future developments for a small group of heroines, each of whom has a chance to tell her own story of the central event and its consequence…

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Girolamo Zanchi, "Confession of the Christian Religion" (Reformation, 2025) 33:04

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In response to the Lutheran Formula of Concord, representatives of Reformed churches commissioned Girolamo Zanchi to draft a confession of faith acceptable to all Reformed churches. Zanchi patterned his Confession of the Christian Religion after the Apostles' Creed, giving it a broadly Trinitarian and redemptive-historical structure that emphasizes…

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James Graham Wilson, "America's Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan" (Cornell UP, 2024) 1:15:07

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In America's Cold Warrior, James Graham Wilson traces Paul Nitze's career path in national security after World War II, a time when many of his mentors and peers returned to civilian life. Serving in eight presidential administrations, Nitze commanded White House attention even when he was out of government, especially with his withering criticism …

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151 Why I Panel, Part One: Kristin Mahoney, Nasser Mufti (JP) 32:43

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Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up--we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why? To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature asked to speak at the S…

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Anthony Bidulka, "Home Fires Burn" (Stonehouse Publishing, 2025) 1:00:04

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NBN host Hollay Ghadery has a wonderful conversation with many-time award-winning author, Anthony Bidulka. Bidulka’s books have been shortlisted for Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, Saskatchewan Book Awards, a ReLit award, and Lambda Literary Awards. Flight of Aquavit was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Mystery, making…

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Roger Chickering, "The German Empire, 1871–1918" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 57:06

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Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in Imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unification to the close of the First World War. Throughout this time, national unity remained an acute issue. It appeared to be resolved momentarily in t…

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NIAS Podcast from the University of Tartu Asia Centre China's Psychological Power 40:14

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This podcast episode is hosted by Toomas Hanso International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) who is talking to Urmas Hõbepappel. Urmas is an analyst at the University of Tartu Asia Centre and a researcher at the ICDS. His academic work deals with political psychology, collective identity, and history narratives in China, but this episode foc…

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Talin Suciyan, "Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents" (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2025) 50:03

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This reader brings to light newly discovered archival material compiled by the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. The book reveals the lives and experience of Armenians in Turkey in the 1940s, with a particular focus on the process of emigration to Soviet Armenia. The accounts, translated for the first time into English, are comprised of Soviet official…

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Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024) 1:06:26

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When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Sovie…

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Is Beach Safety Signage Fit For Purpose? 31:08

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We often take the meaning of signs for granted but that's far from the case in a linguistically and culturally diverse society. The instruction to "Swim between the flags!" can be interpreted in multiple ways - some of which may actually heighten rather than reduce risk. In this episode of Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Dr Ma…

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Alfonso Martinez Arias, "The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life" (Basic Books, 2023) 1:01:56

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What defines who we are? For decades, the answer has seemed obvious: our genes, the “blueprint of life.” In The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life, biologist Alfonso Martinez Arias argues we’ve been missing the bigger picture. It’s not our genes that define who we are, but our cells. While genes are impor…

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Christoph Schuringa, "Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 51:33

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It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philosophy. In Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Christoph Schuringa proposes a radically different reading of Marx's intellectual project and demonstrates tha…

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Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024) 1:06:26

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When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Sovie…

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Sarah Nagaty, "The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) 36:56

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The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) links two seminal moments in Egypt’s history – the Revolution of 25th January 2011 and the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser – through various cultural manifestations. It conceives the concept of “collective dreaming” to map out the subliminal feeling that runs deep…

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Elisabeth Åsbrink "And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War" (Other Press, 2020) 1:05:31

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Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Notable Translated Book of the Year by World Literature Today Winner of the August Prize, the story of the complicated long-distance relationship between a Jewish child and his forlorn Viennese parents after he was sent to Sweden in 1939, and the unexpected friendship the boy developed with the …

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True Crime: Disappearance of Lindsay Wells 26:49

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The disappearance of Lindsay Wells, who vanished while nine months pregnant on March 27, 1999, serves as the central theme of our discussion today with Melanie Flowers, her close friend. In this first part of a two-part series, we delve deeply into the circumstances surrounding Lindsay’s life and the events leading up to her mysterious disappearanc…

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Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, "The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq" (Stanford UP, 2021) 1:25:09

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A new history of Middle East oil and the deep roots of American violence in Iraq. Iraq has been the site of some of the United States' longest and most sustained military campaigns since the Vietnam War. Yet the origins of US involvement in the country remain deeply obscured--cloaked behind platitudes about advancing democracy or vague notions of A…

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Serhii Plokhy, "The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine" (Basic Books, 2015) 1:30:17

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As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today's crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine's sovereignty. Situated between Centra…

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Bonnie Yochelson, "Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen" (Fordham UP, 2025) 1:02:25

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In Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025) by Dr. Bonnie Yochelson, explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and muc…

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Simon Stjernholm, "Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity" (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) 45:23

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Simon Stjernholm's new book Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity (Bloomsbury Press, 2025) considers specific case studies of embodiment and oratory productions by Muslims in Denmark, Sweden, and Cyprus. In the chapter on approaching God, we learn how rituals such as du‘a (intercessory prayers) or dhikr (remembranc…

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Anthony C. Infanti, "The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:06:47

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The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America (NYU Press, 2025) by Anthony C. Infanti documents how the American colonies used tax law to dehumanize enslaved persons, taxing them alongside valuable commodities upon their forced arrival and then as wealth-generating assets in the hands of slaveholders. Dr. Infanti examines how taxation al…

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Kathleen Miller, ed., "Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World" (Penn State UP, 2025) 36:24

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Kathleen Miller talks about her new edited volume, Doctrine and Disease in British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State University Press, 2025). In the sixteenth century, unprecedented migration caused diseases to take hold in new locales, turning illness and the human body into battlegrounds for competing religious beliefs as well as the colonia…