An engrossing social history of the unsinkable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who reigned over the glittering "Beaux Arts Ball,” the social event of New York and Harlem society for fifty years—a glamorous soiree rivaling today’s Met Gala, drawing America’s wealthy and cultured, both…

Amanda Mei Kim speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “California Obscura,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio of writing and art from and about the immigrant farmworker community. Amanda discusses how the essay changed and developed over many drafts. The finished piece explores her childhood growing up…

In the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Elena, Princess of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Leon-Boys explores this Disney property using multiple case studies to understand its approach to girlhood and Latinidad. Following the circuit of culture …

Over the course of our 60th anniversary in 2024, we'll be revisiting some classic Georgetown books. First up is Loyal Dissent by Charles E. Curran. Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian (Georgetown UP, 2006) is the candid and inspiring story of a Catholic priest and theologian who, despite being stripped of his right to teach as a Catholic…

Stella St. Vincent, a thirty-something copy editor in 1980s New York, has survived a relationship with her mother, Celia, so complicated that even the words “my daughter” give Stella pause. Celia lived life to the fullest, reinventing herself and discarding anything that no longer pleased her, including Stella’s father, whom Celia refused even to n…

How did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those experiences and further shape them? Senses of Space in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Terpstra takes an approach that is both global expansive and locally roote…

This provocative and interesting book has received considerable attention. Roaring reviews and interviews include The Financial Times (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Modem (Radio Switzerland Italian), Hufftington Post (Italy), El Diario (Spain), ABC (Australia), History Today (UK), The New Republic (USA), The New Yorker (USA), among others around the wor…

Has any American mayor ever made a greater stamp on the public consciousness than the Little Flower, Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1945? La Guardia is brought to life in historian Terry Golway’s “I Never Did Like Politics”: How Fiorello La Guardia Became America’s Mayor, and Why He Still Matters (St. Martin’s Press, 2024)…

The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Arsalan Khan is an incisive ethnographic study of Pakistan’s Tablighi movement. This piety movement attracts Pakistani Muslim men across class, caste, and social contexts and as such Khan is particularly attuned and reflexive as he navigates …

Plutarch is one of history's most influential authors: his insights were foundational to thinkers ranging from William Shakespeare to Alexander Hamilton, Nietzsche to Montesquieu. Yet, today his writings have fallen out of favor, in part because the genre he pioneered, biography, has fallen out of favor within academia, though it retains popularity…

The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Nativ…

Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lorenza B. Fontana is a pioneering work that explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are grou…

Today’s book is: The Things We Didn’t Know (Gallery Books, 2024), by Dr. Elba Iris Pérez’s. A cross-cultural coming-of-age story, The Things We Didn’t Know is inspired by the author’s own experiences growing up between Woronoco, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico. It explores Andrea Rodríguez’s childhood between Puerto Rico and a small Massachusetts fa…

The Study of Photography in Latin America: Critical Insights and Methodological Approaches (University of New Mexico Press, 2023) provides an insider's perspective to the study of photography. Nathanial Gardner provides readers with a carefully structured introduction that lays out his unique methodology for this book, which features over eighty ph…

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and …

The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the monumental Sanskrit epic of the life of Rama, ideal man and incarnation of the great god Visnu, has profoundly affected the literature, art, religions, and cultures of South and Southeast Asia from antiquity to the present. Filled with thrilling battles, flying monkeys, and ten-headed demons, the work, composed almost 3…

How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf …

On this week's episode, Modya and David are joined by the artist, writer, coach, and fellow podcaster Avrum Rosensweig to discuss parshat Metzora in the Book of Leviticus (Lev. 14:1-15:32), and what can be learned about the trait of tzedek, or righteousness. The wide-ranging discussion centers on the importance of being careful in one's speech, as …

Debby Koren's book Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa (Academic Studies Press, 2023) contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communiti…

With a presidential campaign in the US just around the corner and populist and authoritarian thinkers gaining broader platforms, University of Notre Dame political scientist A. James McAdams shines a light on the terms being used today by the Far Right to undermine liberal democracy. How successful are these thinkers in changing public views? And h…

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Jen McCall, one of our commissioning editors to talk about CEU Press’ new series entitled CEU Press Perspectives. Jen talks about the aims and goals of this new series and introduces the first three books. The CEU Press Perspectives series of…

An intellectual who hated intellectuals, a socialist who didn't trust the state--our foremost political essayist and author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was a man of stark, puzzling contradictions. Knowing Orwell's life and reading Orwell's works produces just as many questions as it answers. Celebrated Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor gui…

With his new book Sun, Sea, Soil, Wine: Winemaking on the North Fork of Long Island (SUNY Press, 2024), Richard Olsen-Harbich, Long Island's longest-tenured winemaker, weighs in on what makes the North Fork so unique for fine wine production. He shares his journey through the intricate art of winemaking – a tale of dedication, passion, and the rema…

Johnny Mize was one of the greatest hitters in baseball’s golden age of great hitters. Born and raised in tiny Demorest, Georgia, in the northeast Georgia mountains, Mize emerged from the heart of Dixie as a Bunyonesque slugger, a quiet but sharp-witted man from a broken home who became a professional player at seventeen, embarking on an extended t…

Bruce O'Neill's Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) gets to the bottom of the twenty-first-century city, literally. Underground moves beneath Romania’s capital, Bucharest, to examine how the demands of global accumulation have extended urban life not just upward into higher skylines, and outward to ever mo…

Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70 (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Liz Tregenza seeks to revise the notion that wholesale couturiers were simply copyists and demonstrate the complexities of their design processes and business strategies. This term has fallen out of usage; however, it was used to describe the pinnacle of the British ready-to-we…

St. Brigid is the earliest and best-known of the female saints of Ireland. In the generation after St. Patrick, she established a monastery for men and women at Kildare which became one of the most powerful and influential centres of the Church in early Ireland. The stories of Brigid's life and deeds survive in several early sources, but the most i…

Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Cathy Yue Wang's Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy (Wayne State Univer…