Progressive Geographies

Christos Lynteris, How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic – Johns Hopkins University Press, May 2026

How modern epidemiology was born through the unlikely rise of the plague rat.

Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals at all. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history’s deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats, anthropologist Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an estimated 15 million lives by the mid-twentieth century.

This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures, as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning.

This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease.

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago – MIT Press, April 2024

New Books discussion with Matt Wells – thanks to dmf for the link

A richly visual architectural history and theory of modernity that reexamines Thorstein Veblen’s classic text The Theory of the Leisure Class through the lens of Chicago in the 1890s.

An important critic of modern culture, American economist Thorstein Veblen is best known for the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” the ostentatious and wasteful display of goods in the service of social status—a term he coined in his 1899 classic The Theory of the Leisure Class. In the field of architectural history, scholars have employed Veblen in support of a wide range of arguments about modern architecture, but never has he attracted a comprehensive and critical treatment from the viewpoint of architectural history. In Barbarian Architecture, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury corrects this omission by reexamining Veblen’s famous book as an original theory of modernity and situating it in a particular place and time—Chicago in the 1890s.

Merwood-Salisbury takes her title from Veblen’s use of the term “barbarian,” which refers to his belief that Gilded Age American society was a last remnant of a barbarian state of greed and acquisitiveness. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on biography, intellectual history, and historiography, she explores Veblen’s position in relation to debates about industrial reform and aesthetics in Chicago during the period 1890–1906. Bolstered by a strong visual narrative made possible by several of Chicago’s historic photographic collections, Barbarian Architecture makes a compelling and original argument for the influence of Veblen’s home city on his work and ideas.

Peter Ekman, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge and Doubt in America’s Postwar Urbanism – Cornell University Press, November 2024

Timing the Future Metropolis—an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science—explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban “crisis” and “renewal,” that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT. 

Through its sprawling programs of “organized research,” its manifold connections to universities, foundations, publishers, and policymakers, and its years of consultation on the planning of a new city in Venezuela—Ciudad Guayana—the Joint Center became preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualize the urban future as an object of knowledge. Timing the Future Metropolisultimately compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, rethinking how we might imagine cities yet to come—and the consequences of deciding not to.

Yii-Jan Lin, Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration – Yale University Press, November 2024 

Tracing the metaphor of America as the Book of Revelation’s New Jerusalem, Yii-Jan Lin shows how apocalyptic narratives have been used to exclude unwanted immigrants
 
America appeared on the European horizon at a moment of apocalyptic expectation and ambition. Explorers and colonizers imagined the land to be paradise, the New Jerusalem of the Bible’s Book of Revelation. This groundbreaking volume explores the conceptualization of America as the New Jerusalem from the time of Columbus to the Puritan colonists, through U.S. expansion, and from the eras of Reagan to Trump.
 
While the metaphor of the New Jerusalem has been useful in portraying a shining, God-blessed refuge with open gates, it has also been used to exclude, attack, and criminalize unwanted peoples. Yii-Jan Lin shows how newspapers, political speeches, sermons, cartoons, and novels throughout American history have used the language of Revelation to define immigrants as God’s enemies who must be shut out of the gates. This book exposes Revelation’s apocalyptic logic at work in the history of Chinese exclusion, the association of the unwanted with disease, the contradictions of citizenship laws, and the justification for building a U.S.-Mexico wall like the wall around the New Jerusalem.
 
This book is a fascinating analysis of the religious, biblical, and apocalyptic in American immigration history and a damning narrative that weaves together American religious history, immigration and ethnic studies, and the use of biblical texts and imagery.

Andrea Bardin, Marco Ferrari, Anaïs Nony and Gregorio Tenti eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Gilbert Simondon – Edinburgh University Press, October 2025

An exhaustive introduction to Gilbert Simondon’s oeuvre

• Covers all the different areas of Gilbert Simondon’s work
• Gathers many established researchers with different perspectives and expertise
• A landmark text for students of Simondon’s philosophy

The Edinburgh Companion to Gilbert Simondon displays both the internal coherence of Simondon’s work and its innovative potential in a variety of research fields. The complexity of his philosophical enterprise is rigorously interpreted and made available to researchers that are keen to cross disciplinary boundaries and explore new appropriations of his research. Structured in four distinct sections, the volume hosts a collection of essays penned by scholars who have been working on and through Simondon for several years across different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, politics, law, media, architecture, economy, and ecology. Topics covered range from individuation, technology, imagination and the transindividual to metastability and more.

Philip Pettit, The State – Princeton University Press, March/May 2023

New Books discussion with Caleb Zakarin – thanks to dmf for the link

The future of our species depends on the state. Can states resist corporate capture, religious zealotry, and nationalist mania? Can they find a way to work together so that the earth heals and its peoples prosper? Or is the state just not up to the task? In this book, the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit examines the nature of the state and its capacity to serve goals like peace and justice within and beyond its borders. In doing so, he breaks new ground by making the state the focus of political theory—with implications for economic, legal, and social theory—and presents a persuasive, historically informed image of an institution that lies at the center of our lives.

Offering an account that is more realist than utopian, Pettit starts from the function the polity is meant to serve, looks at how it can best discharge that function, and explores its ability to engage beneficially in the life of its citizens. This enables him to identify an ideal of statehood that is a precondition of justice. Only if states approximate this functional ideal will they be able to deal with the perennial problems of extreme poverty and bitter discord as well as the challenges that loom over the coming centuries, including climate change, population growth, and nuclear arms.