Progressive Geographies

Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty – Princeton University Press, June 2023

Sprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty. The 1848 revolutions sparked decades of heady constitutional experimentation that pushed the very concept of “the state” to its limits. This intricate multinational polity became a hothouse for public law and legal philosophy and spawned ideas that still shape our understanding of the sovereign state today. The Life and Death of States traces the history of sovereignty over one hundred tumultuous years, explaining how a regime of nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of a dynastic empire.

Natasha Wheatley shows how a new sort of experimentation began when the First World War brought the Habsburg Empire crashing down: the making of new states. Habsburg lands then became a laboratory for postimperial sovereignty and a new international order, and the results would echo through global debates about decolonization for decades to come. Wheatley explores how the Central European experience opens a unique perspective on a pivotal legal fiction—the supposed juridical immortality of states.

A sweeping work of intellectual history, The Life and Death of States offers a penetrating and original analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and time, illustrating how the many deaths and precarious lives of the region’s states expose the tension between the law’s need for continuity and history’s volatility.

Update December 2025: lecture and discussion here – thanks to dmf for the link

Peter T. Struck and Sophia Rosenfeld (eds.), A Cultural History of Ideas – Bloomsbury, six volumes, November 2022

A massive, six-volume reference work, at a high price, but looks impressive if you can find a suitable library copy…

How has the nature of ideas evolved over time? How have ideas been shaped, employed and received in different social and cultural contexts?

In a work that spans 2,800 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 62 experts, each contributing an overview of a particular theme in a specific period in history. The volumes explore the development of ideas , primarily in the West, from a range of disciplinary angles.

Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole and, for ease of navigation, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This schema offers the reader the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes or following one theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the 6.

The 6 volumes cover: 1. – Classical Antiquity (800 BCE – 500 CE); 2. – Medieval Age (500 – 1450); 3. – Renaissance (1450 – 1650) ; 4. – Age of Enlightenment (1650 – 1800); 5. – Age of Empire (1800 – 1920); 6. – Modern Age (1920 – 2000+).

Themes (and chapter titles) are: Knowledge; The Human Self; Ethics and Social Relations; Politics and Economies; Nature; Religion and the Divine; Language, Poetry and Rhetoric; The Arts; History.

The page extent is approximately 1,728pp with c. 240 illustrations. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors, Series Preface and Introduction, and concludes with Notes, Bibliography and an Index.

Alisa Zhulina, Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life – Northwestern University Press, January 2024

Reads canonical works of modern drama in relation to the economic ideas of their era

Emerging amid the turbulent rise of market finance and wider socioeconomic changes, modern drama enacted vital critiques of art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann interrogated the meaning of this newly coined economic concept. Acutely aware of their complicity in the system they sought to challenge, these playwrights staged economic questions as moral and political concerns, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the boundaries of bourgeois theater.

Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life reveals the prescient and unsettling visions of life in a new financial and societal reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll’s House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard as well as in lesser-known and long-overlooked works. This wide-ranging study prompts us to reevaluate modern drama and its legacy for the urgent economic and political questions that our present moment.

“An extraordinary book whose scope and ambition are truly impressive. Alisa Zhulina works hard to overcome the academic silos that separate the humanities from economic theory by recuperating a more expansive notion of economics—that of the oikos—to put them in a productive exchange. All of this is executed with the highest rigor, intelligence, and creativity, and grounded in an expansive knowledge of the materials. There aren’t many scholars today who can match Zhulina’s linguistic and intellectual range.” —Leonardo Lisi, Johns Hopkins University 

Generative AI and University Futures: Three Seminars at University of Manchester, May 2023

We’re hosting 3 in person seminars about generative AI and university futures at the University of Manchester on Critical AI literacy (May 10th), Assessment Reform (May 17th) and Training for Academics (May 24th). All in person from 3pm to 5pm on those dates. Please only register if you intend to participate in person because we have a limited number of places available for each event, which we intend to offer in the order of registration.

Since it was launched in November 2022, Open AI’s ChatGPT has enthralled millions with its uncanny ability to respond to queries in a conversational manner. Its capacity to immediately respond to natural language questions with detailed factual knowledge has sparked debate about whether the typical forms of university-based assessment can survive this technological innovation. While there are many questions remaining to be answered about how different groups within the student community perceive these developments, and the extent to which they are already being used in assessment, there is a widespread belief within the university sector that something fundamental has shifted. This rapid growth in generative AI’s capacity to automatically produce authoritative cultural forms presents a challenge to the university as a custodian of knowledge and conferrer of credentials…

More details and booking form here.