Progressive Geographies

Isabel K. Köster, Stealing from the Gods: Temple Robbery in the Roman Imagination – University of Michigan Press, January 2026

Stealing from the Gods investigates how authors writing between the first century BCE and second century CE addressed the issue of temple robbery or sacrilegium. As a self-proclaimed empire of pious people, the Romans viewed temple robbery as deeply un-Roman and among the worst of offenses. On the other hand, given the constant financial pressures of warfare and administration, it was inevitable that the Romans would make use of the riches stored in sanctuaries. In order to resolve this dilemma, the Romans distinguished sharply between acceptable and unacceptable removals of sacred property. When those who conducted themselves as proper Romans plundered the property of the gods, their actions were for the good of the state. In contrast, the temple robber was viewed as a stranger to the norms of Roman society and an enemy of the state.

Roman authors including Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Appian, and Pausanias present isolated, grotesque individuals whose actions have no bearing on the conduct of Romans as a whole, rendering temple robbery not a matter of collective responsibility, but of individual moral failure. By revealing how narratives of temple robbery are constructed from a literary perspective and how they inform discourses about military conquest and imperial rule, Isabel K. Köster shines a new light on how the Romans coped with the more pernicious aspects of their empire.

Bettina Brandt & Daniel L. Purdy eds. Colonialism and Enlightenment: The Legacy of German Race Theories – Oxford University Press, November 2025

For the last 30 years, scholars have treated Enlightenment race theory and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events. In Colonialism and Enlightenment, editors Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy present perspectives from scholars across the fields of philosophy, postcolonialism, literature, and German and African American studies, who challenge this view, providing a critical examination of the historical connection between “scientific” racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the forces of colonialism and Nazism over a hundred years later.
From its first formulations in the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century, German race theory was implicated in colonialism. Philosophers and biologists drew their arguments about race from information that was generated by the slave trade and plantation economies in the Americas. Their reliance on colonial data was applied to so-called “internal colonization” within Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as to seaborn European competition in South Asia. Most strikingly, some of the sites of German race theorization, such as East Prussia and the Baltic states, were themselves long-established colonies with ethnic separations between ruling and laboring populations. Race theory depended not only on the exploration of distant islands in the Pacific, but on the long-term exploitation and breeding of forcefully transported populations across the Atlantic. Without the involuntary migration of Africans, nineteenth century racial scientists would not have been able to engage in arguments about crossbreeding, skull size, and skin color. 
The chapters in this volume explore how eighteenth-century German theories about race reinforced discourses on colonial settlements, both within and outside Europe. Given the multiple, often contradictory positions developed in the Enlightenment, Brandt and Purdy explore how later race thinkers responded to earlier concepts. How did Enlightenment-era debates figure into later forms of racism? How did nationalist and Nazi racisms view Enlightenment anthropology? What Enlightenment concepts and configurations persisted into the twentieth century? Taking a broad view, the scholars in this volume offer a variety of positions on these and other questions as they take stock of the debates about race and the Enlightenment held over the last 20 years.

Martin Shuster, Critical Theory: The Basics – Routledge, 2024

New Books discussion with Dave O’Brien

Critical Theory: The Basics brings clarity to a topic that is confusingly bandied about with various meanings today in popular and academic culture.

First defined by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s, “critical theory” now extends far beyond its original German context around the Frankfurt School and the emergence of Nazism. We now often speak of critical theories of race, gender, anti-colonialism, and so forth. This book introduces especially the core program of the first-generation of the Frankfurt School (including Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse), and shows how this program remains crucial to understanding the problems, ideologies, and systems of the modern world, including capitalism, racism, sexism, and the enduring problems of colonialism. It explores basic questions like:

• What is critical theory?
• What can critical theory be? What should it be?
• Why and how does critical theory remain vital to understanding the contemporary world, including notions of self, society, politics, art, religion, culture, race, gender, and class?

With suggestions for further reading, this book is an ideal starting point for anyone seeking an accessible but robust introduction to the richness and complexity of this tradition and to its continuing importance today.

Thomas M. Wilson ed. Border Studies: A Multidisciplinary Approach – Edward Elgar, August 2025

Very expensive hardback only, unfortunately, but e-book also available.

This multidisciplinary book provides a diverse overview of social science approaches to geopolitical borders, social boundaries and cultural frontiers. It discusses the multiplicity of borders with a view to addressing the question: how far have we come?

Chapters present narratives on statecraft, law and violence relating to geopolitical borders, adopting cultural and historical perspectives. An array of esteemed specialists examine political imaginaries of border security and identify methodological innovations that will enhance future scholarly work in the field. They highlight regional and global problems tied to borders, looking at issues such as sovereignty, citizenship, security, migration and social justice. Ultimately, it illustrates that metaphorical borders delineating identity and culture are as real as any political, economic or social boundary.

Border Studies: A Multidisciplinary Approach draws on perspectives from geography, political science, international relations, history, social anthropology, law and economics, making this an invigorating read for scholars in these fields. Practitioners in politics, government, international relations and law will also greatly benefit from its unique insights.