By Douglas M. Jesseph (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) In 1655, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes claimed he had solved the centuries-old problem of "squaring of the circle" (constructing a square equal in area to a given circle). With a scathing rebuttal to Hobbes’s claims, the mathematician John Wallis began one of the longest and most intense intellectual … Continued
By Robert A. Ferguson (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) This literary history of the American Revolution captures both the competition and the correspondences of religious and political conviction in the new nation. Robert Ferguson’s trenchant interpretation of Enlightenment thought reveals a forgotten tension in early republican writing, and the result is a new understanding of a pivotal but … Continued
Edited by William W. Hallo (NHC Fellow, 1987–88), Bruce William Jones, and Gerald L. Mattingly Interdisciplinary studies dealing with various aspects of the Hebrew Bible in relation to their literary, cultural, and historical contexts, especially the context of ancient Mesopotamia.
By Wing Chung Ng (NHC Fellow, 1996–97) In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city’s Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an … Continued
By Mary Hunter (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) Mozart’s comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in … Continued
By Derek Attridge (NHC Fellow 2014–15; 2016–17) Was the experience of poetry–or a cultural practice we now call poetry–continuously available across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson's Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616? How did the pleasure afforded by the crafting of language into memorable … Continued
Edited by Daniel Conway (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) and Alan D. Schrift From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the … Continued
By R. W. B. Lewis (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) Lewis presents an account of one of the foremost intellectual families in American history. He begins with the originator's, William James of Albany, emigration in 1789 from Ireland and concludes with the death in 1916 of the great novelist Henry James. The emphasis throughout is the family … Continued
By John F. Kasson (NHC Fellow, 1980–81; 2009–10) Her image appeared in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily; she rivaled FDR and Edward VIII as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened the homes of countless admirers: from a black laborer’s cabin in South Carolina and young Andy Warhol’s house in … Continued
Translated by Hilde Hoogenboom (NHC Fellow, 2000–01) and Mark Cruse