Roland Elliot Brown, "Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda" (FUEL, 2019)

Roland Elliot Brown, "Godless Utopia: Soviet ...

Up next

Nabil Ali, "Gold from Newton's Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract and create rich blue and purple pigments from them. Humans have been extracting dyes and inks from natural materials for millennia, ...  Show more

Decolonizing the Novum

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material a ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Roland Elliot Brown, "Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda" (FUEL, 2019)
New Books in Art

In the arc of Soviet history, few government programs were as tenacious as the anti-religious campaign, which systematically set out to debunk organized religion as "the opium of the people." This political storm of heaven lasted from the earliest days of Bolshevik power up until ...  Show more

Eleonor Gilburd, "To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture" (Harvard UP, 2018)
New Books in Art

Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West.  A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers.  A year after Stalin’s death, author ...  Show more

Putin's Religious War
Beyond Belief

Days before Russian troops entered Ukraine in late February, President Vladimir Putin gave an impassioned address to the Russian people attempting to justify what he was about to carry out. He referred to Ukraine as 'an inalienable part' of Russia's 'spiritual space'. It's one of ...  Show more

Michael O’Sullivan, "Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
New Books in German Studies

How did Catholic mysticism shape politics and religion in 20th-century Germany? What do seers, stigmatics, and Marian apparitions reveal about broader cultural trends? Michael O’Sullivan’s award winning new book examines how longing for the divine paradoxically drove secularism. ...  Show more