New Books in Critical Theory

Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy with Roger T. Ames (SUNY Press, 2025)

Contrasts classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with Confucian "zoetology" ("the art of living"). In Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First P

God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology with N Gray Sutanto (Bloomsbury, 2024)

God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology (Bloomsbury, 2024)is the first book to apply Bavinck's theological anthropology to contemporary theological

Realism After the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel with Rafael Walker (U Chicago Press, 2025)

The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisd

Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience with Laurence J. Kirmayer (Cambridge UP, 2025)

It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor:

Working with Critical Realism: Stories of Methodological Encounters with Alpesh Maisuria and Grant Banfield (Routledge, 2022)

Working with Critical Realism: Stories of Methodological Encounters (Routledge, 2022) is an international and interdisciplinary collection that gathers stories from resea

An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa with Elisa Prosperetti (Cambridge UP, 2026)

In An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge UP, 2026), Elisa Prosperetti argues that while racialized, c

Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism with Julia Bailey (U Illinois Press, 2026)

The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset th

Think of England: Nation, People, and Race in the English Imagination with Paul Kléber Monod (Cambridge UP, 2026)

What is the basis of English national identity? How has this changed over time, and what is its future? Tracing the history of English identity over more than 2,000 years

To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian with Zahi Zalloua (Bloomsbury, 2026)

In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, "How does it feel to be a problem?" In this profound response to that quest

Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children with Stacey Patton (Beacon Press, 2026)

A powerful, unsettling, and unflinching exploration that forces readers to confront lynching as a devastating legacy of white childhood conditioning, and to reckon with t

The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice with Federica Coppola (Cambridge UP, 2026)

The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice (Cambridge UP, 2026) highlights the concept of 'belonging' as an unprecedented lens

Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order with Sasikumar Sundaram (Columbia UP, 2026)

Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to

Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism with Jeffrey Champlin (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism (U Toronto Press, 2025) examines the deep historical roots of fundamentalism in Protestantism and the imaginative traditions o

How to Stay Human Forever: On America's Digital Technology Crisis with James Poulos

Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the cor

Do We Really Need To Choose Between Jobs and the Environment?

Host Licia Cianetti talks to Lorenzo Feltrin about his recent book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2016). They discuss how the clima

The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st-Century Fascism with Max Haiven (MIT Press, 2026)

A provocative examination of the ways our economy has been rigged by financialization, and the importance of games to our dangerous political moment. In an age when capit

How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture with Carol C. Mukhopadhyay and Rosemary Henze (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)

Tune in to this discussion about How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture by Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda T. Moses (Rowman & Litt

Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891-1931 with Edward Baring (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Offers a transformative reading of the Marxist tradition by uncovering its connections to the institutions and practices of worker education. For the past hundred years,

Wastelands and Wonderlands: Utopias and Dystopias in Film and Literature with Matthew Leggatt (SUNY Press, 2026)

Wastelands and Wonderlands: Utopias and Dystopias in Film and Literature with Matthew Leggatt (SUNY Press, 2026) is an edited collection exploring utopias ad dystopias i

Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities with yasser elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (U Virginia Press, 2026)

Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (U Virginia Press, 2026) examines the epistemological adjustments that take place when we make w