Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for The Harvard Brief
ArtsBooksHistory

The Harvard Brief

New Books Network

Interviews with authors of Harvard UP books.

Play
Open in
  • 27 episodes
  • Avg 52 min
  • English

Episodes 27

NewestOldestLongest
All7Unplayed7In progress0Played0
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • #550
    April 28 · 1 hr 3 min

    Raffaele Danna, "The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been known that this transition stemmed from Europe’s increasing exchanges with India, Persia, and the Arabic world. Yet much remains to be understood about how Indo-Arabic numerals—and the practical arithmetic they enabled—actually spread across Europe. As Dr. Raffaele Danna shows in The Craft of Indo-Arabi

  • #548
    April 21 · 47 min

    Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2023)

    Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. The book offers a new history of epidemiology by shifting focus to the people behind the data points—people who were enslaved, imprisoned, or in some circles overlooked by conventional histories of epidemiology. The book shifts across locations a

  • #549
    April 21 · 1 hr 4 min

    Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands. The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921 (Harvard University Press, 2026) is the definitive history

  • #547
    April 9 · 38 min

    Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Panini’s Ashtadyayi is one of the most famous works in Sanskrit, a so-called “linguistic machine” that, through its 4,000 words, allows someone to generate words and grammar. Generations of commentators have tried to figure out exactly how to best interpret the work and explain its various contradictions and overlapping instructions. Then, in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, said he’d figured out how to unravel Panini’s work to create a cohesive set of rules–and potentially wi

  • #546
    March 31 · 1 hr

    Peter Mauch, "Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    The military general who became Emperor Hirohito’s prime minister, Tojo Hideki is most often remembered as an iron-fisted leader who dragged Japan into World War II and—after spectacular losses—was eventually executed as a war criminal. Yet Tojo was far more than his ignominious end. In fact, as Dr. Peter Mauch argues in Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General (Harvard University Press, 2026), he was one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished military sta

  • #545
    March 16 · 14 min

    Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

    In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks with Erik Baker about the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. The dominant work ethic of our current moment, it asks us to constantly create new work for ourselves. Eric contrasts the entrepreneurial work ethic with the industrious work ethic, which valued hard work and drudgery in one’s allotted task. Over the course of the 20th century industriousness was replaced by entrepreneurship in the American economic imaginary. The ultimate villain of the entrepren

  • #544
    March 13 · 1 hr 38 min

    Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, "The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters (Harvard UP, 2026) is a groundbreaking history of political struggle in the Spanish New World, where commoners and elites alike challenged the social order through the remarkable power of paperwork. As Spanish conquistadors swept through the New World, the Crown envisioned that a rigidly hierarchical aristocratic order would flourish in their wake. At first, this vision seemed

Showing 21–27 of 27 episodes