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Interventions | The Intellectual History Podcast

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Latest episodes

Exploring the Origins of American Slavery (with John Samuel Harpham)

October 26, 2026 · 1 hr 37 min

In 1597, Queen Elizabeth I wrote a letter to the mythical Christian Emperor of Ethiopia, an elusive figure known since the Middle Ages as 'Prester John'. The letter may not have reached its intended audience. But for contemporary…
Decomposing Historians (with Elise Garritzen)

May 29, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

Should you judge a book by its cover? Victorian historians and their readers did; and through examining the decisions that went into binding, titling, annotating and prefacing historical works, we can recover some of the anxieties and…
Plato’s Political Ideas: From Limited Rule to Tyranny (with Melissa Lane)

March 30, 2026 · 1 hr 15 min

Who will rule the rulers? Who will chaperone the chaperones? Who will guard the guardians? These questions are rarely associated with Plato. Usually seen as the arch-defender of the rule of the enlightened few over the ignorant many, he…
Sketching Characters: from Ancient Moralists to the Mansplainer (with Katie Ebner-Landy)

February 10, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min

Theophrastus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He wrote widely on topics including metaphysics, plant-life, dizziness, odours, and juice. Most notably, though, he was the author of a colourful text detailing the vices of thirty typical…
The Curious Case of Martin Crusius (with Richard Calis)

December 8, 2025 · 40 min

Martin Crusius (1526-1607) spent most of his life in the Lutheran town of Tübingen. While there, he became Europe's foremost expert on Ottoman Greece. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he held with the Greek Orthodox alms-seekers who…

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Mary Wollstonecraft: The Honest Educator (with Sylvana Tomaselli)

October 22, 2025 · 57 min

By her death in 1797 at the age of 38, Mary Wollstonecraft had produced a body of work unmatched for its honesty and critical acumen. In a society where marriage often amounted to legal prostitution, Wollstonecraft confronted the ways in…
African-American Ideas about Race (with Mia Bay)

September 17, 2025 · 1 hr 0 min

After the founding of the American Republic, African-American Intellectuals never accepted passively the narratives of racial difference maintained by the defenders of slavery and segregation. At a time when the belief in human equality…
Liberty as Independence (with Quentin Skinner)

July 21, 2025 · 1 hr 1 min

Sometime in the eighteenth century, a great transformation took place in the language of liberty. Since the days of the Roman Republic, to be free had meant to be independent of the arbitrary will of another. You enjoyed freedom if nobody…
Abolitionist Ideas: Battling the Slave Trade in Britain

June 9, 2025 · 1 hr 11 min

If you visited Britain around 1700, you’d find hardly a single advocate of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. You’d hear the institution of slavery described as a moral evil, but no one would tell you that it could be done…
Carl Schmitt: The Thoughtful Nazi (with Lars Vinx and Samuel Zeitlin)

April 27, 2025 · 1 hr 54 min

Why is Carl Schmitt one of the most widely read political theorists of the twentieth century? A lifelong antisemite, a petty careerist, a Nazi ideologue who only avoided being tried at Nuremberg because he wasn’t considered important…
Indigenous Ideas: A Global Perspective (with Saliha Belmessous)

March 4, 2025 · 60 min

In 1686, a French witness spoke openly of a Native American declaration of independence. ‘We have to assume’, he said, ‘that the Iroquois do not accept any master’. Claims such as this were made frequently throughout the history of…
Slavery, Empire, and John Locke (with Mark Goldie)

February 4, 2025 · 1 hr 6 min

John Locke continues to excite controversy. For American liberals, he is an honorary Founding Father, one of the architects of modern democracy. In their view, as Allan Bloom put it, ‘the whole world is divided into two parts, one of which…

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About the show

What do intellectual historians currently investigate? And why is this relevant for us today? These are some of the questions our podcast series, led by graduate students at the University of Cambridge, seeks to explore. It aims to introduce intellectual historians and their work to everyone with an interest in history and politics. Do join in on our conversations!