Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

It’s one of the biggest questions in economic history: How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of the Industrial Revolution, and not China? And what does that journey tell us about politics and culture? In Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 (Princeton UP, 2025), Guido Tabellini, alongside his co-authors, argues that the answer comes from how European and Chinese organized cooperation—through corporations in Europe and through clans in China—and how that shaped each one’s society. Guido Tabellini is the Intesa Sanpaolo Chair in Political Economics and Vice President at Bocconi University.

The African Gold Coast writer and statesman J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought as well as African and British imperial literary and intellectual history. In The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa (Princeton UP, 2026) Jeanne-Marie Jackson positions his career as an intriguing case study of anticolonial literature and politics. Jackson maps the contours of Casely Hayford’s thought through sustained attention to his written work within its Gold Coast and British imperial contexts, demonstrating the far-reaching conceptual and aesthetic resources of his elite legal background.Treating Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound, as a constitutional document and his legal writings as literary exemplars, Jackson breaks down artificial divisions between African textual traditions. The law, for Casely Hayford and his Fante nationalist peers, was intimately bound to the virtues they attached to textuality: clear-headedness, moderation, restraint, and public discernment. Jackson argues for this liberal disposition as a crucial and neglected part of anticolonial intellectual and political history. Colonial-era legal debates framed the rise of an influential, consummately modern Gold Coast leader deemed fit to steer ambitious new pan-African institutions, and, in Jackson’s telling, Casely Hayford emerges as his era’s most emblematic figure. Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore.

Why did Langston Hughes's translations of Mexican and Cuban stories go unpublished for nearly a century? A landmark book—the first complete publication of Langston Hughes’s translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories, as he wrote to a friend, explore “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists,” and are “mostly all left stories, because practically all the writers down here are left these days.” But when Hughes proposed publishing the stories as a book, to be titled Troubled Lands: Stories of Mexico and Cuba as Translated by Langston Hughes (Princeton University Press, 2026), his agent discouraged him from further pursuing the project and it remained unpublished, until now, with only a handful of the translations making their way into contemporary magazines. This volume presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. Edited by Ricardo Wilson, the book also features an introduction and brief biographies of the included writers. Troubled Lands features thirty-three stories by eighteen writers, including Rafael Felipe Muñoz, Nellie Campobello, Lino Novás Calvo, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Germán List Arzubide, Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, and Juan de la Cabada. The collection depicts Mexico in the wake of its revolution and Cuba in the years between the brutal regimes of Machado and Batista. Hughes was a noted translator of poetry, but his commitment to translating fiction is less well known. Troubled Lands provides a window into this important dimension of his work and illuminates his deep interest in Mexico and Cuba. Ricardo A. Wilson II is a creative writer and scholar. He is associate professor of English at Williams College and founder and executive director of The Outpost Foundation. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them most. In The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America (Princeton UP, 2025), Melissa Burch sheds light on one of the most significant forces of social and economic marginalization of our time—discrimination on the basis of criminal records. Chronicling the daily interactions of hiring managers, workforce development professionals, and job-seekers with felony convictions in Southern California, Dr. Burch shows that this discrimination is not simply a matter of employer bias. Hiring is shaped by a set of institutions, organizations, and industries that promote the erroneous idea that people with criminal records are dangerous to employ. This “criminal record complex,” as Dr. Burch names it, encourages exclusion and undermines employers’ common-sense ways of assessing candidates. In vivid and intimate detail, Dr. Burch reveals both the futility and devastating human consequences of discriminatory policies.Dr. Burch places today’s routine practice of background screening within racialized notions of risk originating in early capitalist development, tracing how, over decades, criminal background checks became a convenient catch-all, leveraged by entities with a direct interest in growing the practice. Despite this reach, however, Dr. Burch discovers that small business owners tend to put less value on background checks, trusting their own judgment. Approaching the issue from both personal and policy perspectives, The Criminal Record Complex upends what we thought we knew about the causes of criminal record discrimination. It suggests that our best hope for creating safe workplaces lies not in the false promise of background screening, but in building the kinds of economies and communities that support true safety. Our guest is: Dr. Melissa Burch, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and Director of the Afterlives of Conviction Project. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine Carceral Apartheid Freemans Challenge Hands Up Don't Shoot The Names of all the Flowers The Journal of Higher Education in Prison Black Boy Out of Time Secrets of the Killing State Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

In his new book, The Political Economy of Security (Princeton University Press, 2026), Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and theoretical examination of how economic factors influence security affairs. Empirically, he analyzes how various economic variables affect interstate war, terrorism, and civil war; in total, sixteen pathways are examined.  Brooks shows that the relationship between economic factors and conflict is complex and multifaceted; discrete economic factors—such as international trade, economic development, and globalized manufacturing, to name a few—are sometimes helpful for promoting peace and stability, but at other times are detrimental. Brooks also develops a stronger theoretical foundation for guiding future research on the economics-security interaction. Drawing on Adam Smith, he provides a more complete range of answers to the three key conceptual questions analysts must consider: how economic goals relate to security goals; what economic factors to focus on; and how economic actors influence security policies.Combining an innovative theoretical understanding with empirical rigor, Brooks’s account will reshape our understanding of the political economy of security. Our guest is Professor Stephen Brooks, a Professor of Government at Dartmouth. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

What did slavery actually look like in the everyday lives of Jews in the medieval Middle East? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Craig Perry to discuss his groundbreaking book Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton UP, 2026). Drawing on the extraordinary archive of the Cairo Geniza, Perry reconstructs a hidden world of enslaved people, merchants, and households in medieval Egypt. These fragments—letters, contracts, and legal questions preserved for centuries in a synagogue—reveal how slavery shaped Jewish and Islamic society at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. From global slave trading networks that stretched from Europe and Africa to India, to the intimate spaces of kitchens and courtyards, Perry uncovers how enslaved people lived, labored, resisted, and sometimes entered Jewish communities after gaining their freedom. The story even reframes familiar rituals: medieval Jewish children could look around the Passover table and see slavery embodied in the people serving the meal. Together, Perry and Katz explore how this overlooked history forces us to rethink medieval Jewish life, the social realities behind religious texts, and the complex entanglements of Jews with the broader Arab-Islamic world. About the Guest Craig Perry is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. A specialist in the social and economic history of the medieval Middle East, his research focuses on slavery, law, and everyday life in Jewish and Islamic societies. He also is the editor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420. About the Host Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud, including Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Through his writing, teaching, and podcast conversations with scholars and public thinkers, Katz brings cutting-edge scholarship into dialogue with contemporary Jewish life.

James Bryce (1838–1922) was a leading figure in Britain’s Liberal Party and a distinguished historian, a versatile scholar-politician who moved seamlessly between academia and politics. He was, among many other things, a cabinet minister and a popular ambassador, an expert on American politics and on Roman law, an advocate for the Armenian people and an architect of the League of Nations, a world traveller and a climber of Mount Ararat. In Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect (Princeton UP, 2025), Stuart Jones offers an intellectual biography of Bryce, tracing a Scots-Ulster Presbyterian’s assimilation to the increasingly multiconfessional Victorian state, and a late Victorian Liberal’s encounter with the wider world. Jones shows how a polymathic intelligence grappled with a dizzyingly wide range of concerns and issues, including the challenges of democracy and race relations, the rise of modern universities and the reconstruction of the international order after World War I.In mapping the evolution of Bryce’s thought, Liberal Worlds illuminates the international intellectual networks and the many places across the globe that shaped his thinking. Jones considers, for example, why a man who had a lifelong revulsion against slavery seemed to accept racial segregation in the American South; how a vigorous activist for girls’ and women’s education became a tenacious parliamentary critic of women’s suffrage; and why, over the objections of his Ulster Presbyterian family, he backed Irish home rule. Above all, Jones rescues Bryce—immensely influential in his time, now little remembered—from being consigned to a historical pigeonhole, restoring him to the centre of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over the nature of democratic politics. Stuart Jones is professor of intellectual history at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic, Victorian Political Thought, and Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don. 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: here

How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” and “them”? In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy (Princeton UP, 2025) Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettler and Brown explain the evolution of this gulf across five decades, charting political trends in both places. Drawing on data on individuals, communities, and members of Congress, as well as interviews with local party leaders and former elected officials, they show how the divide emerged and why it poses a threat to democracy. Until about thirty years ago, both political parties attracted support from rural and urban voters. But after place-based inequality grew due to deregulation and trade liberalization, white rural dwellers began to view urban people and Democrats as affluent elites out of touch with their needs. Politically active evangelical churches, antiabortion organizations, and gun groups helped deepen the divide, encouraging many of these rural residents to become staunch supporters of the GOP. Now, regional one-party rule in rural America gives Republicans a systematic edge for gaining control of crucial political institutions, including the Senate, House of Representatives, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. This is helping enable an extremist political party and pushing democracy to the brink. Mettler and Brown argue that the divide can be repaired—but only if the Democrats build their own robust local organizations and offer citizens a meaningful choice. Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in the study of public policymaking and litigation in the US. A former British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, she is the author of the award-winning book,America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Trevor Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In Fall 2026, he will join the University of Oregon's Department of Political Science as Assistant Professor of Inequality.

Mothers and fathers use their time differently, with women spending roughly twice as many hours on family labor as men. But what about the gendered differences in the ways women and men think? What’s on Her Mind examines the cognitive labor that families depend on, and reveals why this essential aspect of family life is disproportionately handled by women—even in couples that aspire to practice equality. While most accounts of household labor center on how people use their time, Dr. Allison Daminger focuses on a less visible and less easily quantifiable aspect of family life. She introduces readers to the concept of cognitive labor—anticipating, researching, deciding, and following up—and shows how women in different-gender couples do most of this critical work. Dr. Daminger argues that cognitive labor has less to do with personality traits—for example, she’s type A while he’s laid-back—and more to do with learned skills that men and women deploy in distinct ways. Yet not all couples fall into the personality trap. Dr. Daminger looks at different-gender couples who achieve a more balanced cognitive allocation while also exploring how queer couples carve out unique relationships to the gender binary. Drawing on original, in-depth interviews with members of different- and same-gender couples, What’s on Her Mind points to new ways of understanding the interplay between who we are as individuals and the cognitive work we do on behalf of our families. Our guest is: Dr. Allison Daminger, who is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She’s the author of What’s On Her Mind; her work has also been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Psychology Today, and the Atlantic. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: You're Doing It Wrong Raising Them Sin Padres Ni Papeles Tomboy PhDing While Parenting Sharing lessons from his working-class parents Recipes, parenting, and grief We Take Our Cities With Us Secret Harvests The Translators Daughter Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2025) explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditions constrain emancipatory desire. Along the way, she advances a novel feminist critical theory of liberalism and the liberal democratic state. She also develops an original theoretical practice that weaves together Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Foucault, and cultural theories of gender and race to analyze contemporary political predicaments. In a new preface, Brown places States of Injury in political and intellectual context, including the rise of neoliberalism, and addresses the book’s renewed relevance in today’s political landscape. Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Nihilistic Times, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and Undoing the Demos. 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: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos