New Books Network

Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that there is no natural form of ownership. Whitman dives deep into the long Western history of this transformation in the legal imagination – the transformation from the ownership of humans and other living creatures to the ownership of land. This change extended over many centuries, coming to fruition only on the threshold of the modern era. It brought with it profound changes, not only in the way we understand ownership but also in the way we understand the state. Its most dramatic consequence arrived in the nineteenth century, with the final disappearance of the lawful private ownership of humans, which had been taken for granted for thousands of years.

James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and Law School and also holds an M.A. in European History from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Chicago.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos
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Explosive sexual scandals, bitter domestic conflicts, and dramatic changes in fortune. Sex, marriage, and family life were matters of enormous consequence in the highly complex societies that formed across the early modern Dutch overseas empire. This was not only true for the colonial authorities that administered settlements on behalf of the Dutch East and West India Companies (VOC and WIC), but also for the people of various backgrounds and statuses that inhabited these places. Focusing primarily on the eighteenth century, this book explores how these disparate and unequally empowered groups contested the norms that governed intimate life in Dutch colonial outposts from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

Sophie Rose, Ph.D. (2023), is a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.
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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and special guest host, Melanie Kiechle (Associate Professor of History, Virginia Tech), chat with radio producers Chris Hoff and and Sam Harnett about their sound production project, The World According to Sound. Hoff and Harnett came to Virginia Tech to put on their octophonic sound show, Ways of Knowing. We recorded this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things in Virginia Tech's Athenaeum, and the conversation includes thoughts and questions from a live audience that gathered there.
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In this episode, Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, and University of Puerto Rico professors Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Maritza Stanchich, discuss something deceptively simple: putting one foot in front of the other—and how that act can reshape the way we perceive the world. Seizing an idea from Steve Prefontaine—that running can be an act of creation—this episode considers how running can extend beyond the physical and extend into memory, relationships, and inheritance. They discuss how running can be a way of thinking, a way of loving, and, at times, a way of understanding who we are.

The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports (Harper/Random House, 2025).

Nuevos Horizontes is the podcast of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.

Quotes, organizations, books, athletes and scholars mentioned in this conversation:


Tony Ruiz, Central Park Track Club

“There’s a lot you can get from Tony Ruiz’s life that you can’t get through mine.” -Nicholas Thompson

“The dignity of enduring the complexity of my father.…she plays a major role in shaping me.” -Nicholas Thompson, about his mother

“It’s really hard when people are still alive to write these kinds of books. It takes a lot of courage on everyone’s part.” -Maritza Stanchich

“Only the disciplined ones in life are free.” -Eliud Kipchoge

Steve Prefontaine

W. Scott Thompson

Puerto Rican boycott of 1980 Olympic Games

Bobbi Gibb


Yaelis Carmona, University of Puerto Rico 

Biomechanics

Falmouth Road Race


Paul Souza, Wheaton College


Souzapalooza, East Falmouth music festival

Phil (PJ) Alessi, North Attleboro


Bill Jennings, Brockton High School Track Coach


William McKay, Falmouth High School English Teacher

Mario Watts

Sergei Bubka

Matt Booth

Joe Gohring

Phillips Academy

Falmouth High SchoolEric Gethers

Falmouth Road Race

Northfield Mount Hermon

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

Frank Shorter

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In Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen traces the ways in which contemporary Irish literature responds to climate breakdown. Drawing upon concepts of sovereignty, precarity, and disaster, Sen examines Irish literary works to reveal how they engage with the entangled relations between ecology, economy, and politics. Irish writers not only critique the association of greenness with Ireland and the corporatization of sustainability discourses, they also illuminate the acute challenges that the climate crisis poses to political, social, and cultural forms in addition to ecosystems.

The Irish canon has historically played a crucial role in Irish nationalism. But contemporary works are written at a time when questions of statehood and citizenship are yielding to the cross-border, multi-generational pressures of climate breakdown. Writing in the shadow of modernity's rhetorical and carbon emissions, contemporary authors are skeptical of business-as-usual sustainability jargon emanating from institutions. Instead, they focus on the local variations of the planetary-level threats dominating the discourse of the Anthropocene, placing the country in a webwork of ecological and geo-political relations.

Cleverly written and groundbreaking in scope, Sen's analyses shows that Ireland's postcolonial identity can be especially helpful to analyze the cultural footprint of the climate crisis.

Malcolm Sen is the director of the Environmental Humanities Specialization and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the editor of A History of Irish Literature and the Environment and Race in Irish Literature and Culture.

Helen Penet is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at Université de Lille (France).
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