On this episode of In Theory, Durba Mitra returns to the podcast to talk with Disha Karnad Jani about her new book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026). In this canon-expanding study, Mitra explores the writings and work of women in the decolonizing world during the mid-to-late twentieth century, and how these women sought to forge "a new internationalism" following the formal end of empire. This conversation ranges from the attendant politics of knowledge production to the insights of Toni Morrison to the nature of post-colonial yearning.

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Isadora Moura Mota about her recent book, "Freedom's Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). In shifting the periodization of the history of abolition in Brazil from the 1870s and 1880s to the 1840s and 1860s, Mota recenters the intellectual contributions of the enslaved in this transnational story. This conversation, as a result, touches upon some of the critical implications of this recentering—or, taking these enslaved actors seriously as thinkers in their own right—on the history of political thought and social movements in Brazil and writ large.

For this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Esmat Elhalaby about his first book, "Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization" (University of California Press, 2025), which offers a pathbreaking perspective on the under-explored relationship between Arab and Indian intellectuals throughout the twentieth century and the era of decolonization. Their conversation charts the various forms of knowledge production that arose from these two regions and their shared experiences of imperialism, contemporary critiques of cosmopolitanism, and how else scholars might write global intellectual histories in the present.

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Ahmad Shokr about his monograph, "Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt" (Stanford University Press, 2025). In "Harvests of Liberation," Shokr examines Egyptian decolonization through one of the nation’s most valuable commodities: cotton. In so doing, he weaves a history comprised of various strands and passed through numerous hands—from colonial advisors and nationalist leaders, to agrarian reformers and rural workers—to demonstrate how changes in the cotton economy ultimately led Egyptian nationalists to “embrace policies of land reform and industrialization and adopt a new conception of history.”

In this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quinn Slobodian on his latest book, "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" (Zone Books, 2025). Here, Slobodian looks to the likes of Murray Rothbard, Charles Murray, and Javier Milei and their (mis)readings of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to reveal the entangled relationship between neoliberalism after the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the Far Right today.

In this most recent episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sophia Rosenfeld about her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her book explores how the idea of making a choice from a menu of options arranged by someone else became synonymous with what it meant to be free between the early modern period and the 20th century, via shifts to consumer culture, religious life, romance, and reproduction.

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quentin Skinner on his new book Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge University Press, 2025). In this book, Skinner traces how liberty as a political ideal became tied to independence and the absence of coercion through the political upheavals of early modern England, debates about absolute

monarchy, the American Revolution, discussions of women's independence under the law, and the role of slavery in defining what it meant to be free.

In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sam Klug about his new book The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In this book, Klug explores how the process of decolonization in the 1940s–70s transformed US debates about the role of race in American life, via the analogy of the “internal colony.” The comparison between how race operated in the US and how colonialism functioned in the world was taken up by activists, social scientists, and policymakers alike, and transformed how Black social movements and the US government approached their respective attempts to change American society at the level of race, class, and global politics.

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.