In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Stephen Legg about his new book, "Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities" (University of Georgia Press, 2025). In the book, Legg provides a study of Indian anti-colonialism in the decades before Independence that foregrounds the spatially-mediated and bottom-up politics of old and New Delhi’s poor, its middle classes, and the prominent anti-colonial figures of the Indian National Congress, including especially the women of the anti-colonial movement. He centers the concept of parrhesia (from the later lectures of Michel Foucault) to arrive at an account of the governmentality of anti-colonialism in the years between mass civil disobedience and the Quit India Movement.

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Kevin Pham, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, about his recent book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024). 

In his book, Pham traces the evolution of Vietnamese political thought through six figures, Phan Bội Châu, Phan Chu Trinh, Nguyễn An Ninh, Phạm Quỳnh, Hồ Chí Minh, and Nguyễn Mạnh Tường. He explores how across the 19th and 20th centuries, as generations of Vietnamese thinkers responded to and organized against French and US colonialism, they debated distinct and powerful ways to conceptualize politics, mobilize their people, organize their society, and build a nation through decolonization.

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Asheesh Kapur Siddique, assistant professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, about his recent book, "The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World" (Yale University Press, 2024). 

Siddique examines how early modern British administrators ushered in a new kind of information state and draws together how successive early modern rulers in Britain transformed the collection, preservation, and use of information as they expanded their influence and rule over South Asia and the Americas. Through an analysis of the forms of knowledge encountered by British travelers and administrators and powerful ideas about the role of information in the governance of native populations and Europeans alike, Siddique offers a new history of how mastery over territory, peoples, and information came to be seen as related endeavors.

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, Oxford about her new book, "Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War" (Basic Books, 2025), also available in German as "Für die Freiheit: Der Bauernkrieg 1525" (trans. Holger Fock and Sabine Müller, S. Fischer Verlage, 2024). In this new history of this massive event, Roper closely examines the political, religious, and intellectual worlds of the thousands of peasants who rose up and took over vast lands in what is now Germany, in one of the most decisive moments in the history of the Reformation, and (as we discuss) for the intellectual history of everything from revolution to ecology to brotherhood. By reading the peasants' movements, physical landscape, complaints, dreams, desires, and visions for the future, Roper offers us an account of how, for a few months in the middle of the sixteenth century, the poorest people in Germany almost overturned the social order of their world.

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Marc-William Palen, Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024). 

Palen begins his story in the 1840s, and shows how over a century of left-wing activists, politicians, and scholars imagined ways to transform the world through free-trade economics. People with distinct and overlapping politics populate this world, including anti-colonial nationalists, liberals, socialists, Christians, and feminists. Through an analysis of the evolving discussions of the meaning of free trade and protectionism for war and peace across British, US, French, Dutch, Japanese, and other empires, Palen traces the 19th century left-wing origins of free-trade economics and the contest with its right-wing counterparts to the establishment of the post-1945 economic order.

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Robert Darnton, Professor Emeritus and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard University, about his recent book, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 (W. W. Norton, 2024), also published in French translation: L'humeur révolutionnaire: Paris, 1748-1789 (trans. Hélène Borraz, Gallimard, 2024). 

Darnton traces how the antecedents to revolution circulated among the Parisian public in the decades before the storming of the Bastille, through their everyday oppositions to the rising price of bread, the overreaches of the monarchy, and the policing of poor neighborhoods. Through their growing sense that the powerful in their society were not governing as they should, ordinary people in Paris began to acquire a shared feeling of discontent, and showed this through many forms of public performance and protest. Darnton tracks this as the development of a "revolutionary temper" in Paris, one which made the population ready to change their world in a matter of decades.

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Umut Özsu, Professor in the Department of Law and Legalities at Carleton University, about his book Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960-82 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book shows how jurists from the Third World transformed international law during post-1945 decolonization, and traces the legal dimensions of ideas of territorial sovereignty, resource extraction, justice, and freedom.

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Camille Robcis, Professor of History and French at Columbia University about her recent book Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Robcis traces how the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, together with his colleagues and patients in the village of St-Alban-sur-Limagnole, transformed the practice and theory of psychiatry during and after the Second World War. They did this by turning towards the institution of the hospital itself, and

considering how psychiatric care could be rooted in an ethical and political critique of social conditions. This resulted in a new movement called institutional psychotherapy, which Robcis traces between Spain, France, and Algeria, and in the work and legacies of influential thinkers such as Jean Oury, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Luke Wilkinson interviews Henrike Lähnemann, Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the University of Oxford, to discuss her and Eva Schlotheuber's new book 'The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents' (Open Book Publishers, 2024). They discuss the ideas that circulated through the sounds and spaces of medieval German convents.

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, about her new book "Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution" (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Daut draws out the influential concepts transformed by 18th and 19th century Haitian thinkers writing during and in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. She shows the simultaneous universality and specificity of the Haitian revolutionary moment for the development of enduring ideas about freedom, indigeneity, revolution, and slavery.