Thomas Lay
@thomas-lay.bsky.social
Editor (Fordham). All views my own.
Just out: Marco Motta's ethnography of people who live in Haiti in the face of law that doesn't actually function. A poignant account of living within disillusionment.
December 23, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Just out: Marco Motta's ethnography of people who live in Haiti in the face of law that doesn't actually function. A poignant account of living within disillusionment.
Just out: Amal Eqeiq on South-South solidarity. Through work in Chiapas and Palestine and on narrative texts from both traditions, Eqeiq theorizes affinity as a framework for thinking nonreductive forms of connection and resistance.
December 18, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Just out: Amal Eqeiq on South-South solidarity. Through work in Chiapas and Palestine and on narrative texts from both traditions, Eqeiq theorizes affinity as a framework for thinking nonreductive forms of connection and resistance.
Just out: Debarati Sanyal looks migration, displacement, and the arts produced by and around them. A fascinating and urgent account of the relation between politics and aesthetics. Many thanks to Marianne Hirsch and Miriam Ticktin for blurbing it.
December 9, 2025 at 5:16 PM
Just out: Debarati Sanyal looks migration, displacement, and the arts produced by and around them. A fascinating and urgent account of the relation between politics and aesthetics. Many thanks to Marianne Hirsch and Miriam Ticktin for blurbing it.
I was proud when I heard Liron had won this well deserved award. And I am proud too of her statement in declining it.
utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/mla-...
utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/mla-...
utotherescue.blogspot.com
November 27, 2025 at 2:46 AM
I was proud when I heard Liron had won this well deserved award. And I am proud too of her statement in declining it.
utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/mla-...
utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/mla-...
Come visit at AAA!
November 19, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Come visit at AAA!
Not a book I sponsored, but don't miss some early Ricoeur, courtesy of my colleague John Garza, who, along with Jack Caputo, is doing a wonderful job with the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series. David Pellauer did an excellent job with the translation.
November 18, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Not a book I sponsored, but don't miss some early Ricoeur, courtesy of my colleague John Garza, who, along with Jack Caputo, is doing a wonderful job with the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series. David Pellauer did an excellent job with the translation.
Just out: Zahid Chaudhary gives a superb psychoanalytic account of what we've been calling post-truth. Chaudhary is a superb reader of the realation of psychic and the social together, and the result is a major account of the psycho-politics of Trumpism and what lies behind and beyond it.
October 29, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Just out: Zahid Chaudhary gives a superb psychoanalytic account of what we've been calling post-truth. Chaudhary is a superb reader of the realation of psychic and the social together, and the result is a major account of the psycho-politics of Trumpism and what lies behind and beyond it.
Just out: Massimiliano Tomba on "outdated" concepts that resurface in politically radical ways. My daughter recently asked me why I'm interested in things from the past if they can't change. My answer was that they do, they resurface and change the present. This book suggests how that might happen.
September 16, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Just out: Massimiliano Tomba on "outdated" concepts that resurface in politically radical ways. My daughter recently asked me why I'm interested in things from the past if they can't change. My answer was that they do, they resurface and change the present. This book suggests how that might happen.
Just out: Basit Iqbal's accout of Islamic humanitarian organizations is a superb ethnography of aid in the wake of the Syrian civil war. But it's more than that too: a philosophically rich account of how Islamic theology might inflect the questions an ethnographer can ask.
September 3, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Just out: Basit Iqbal's accout of Islamic humanitarian organizations is a superb ethnography of aid in the wake of the Syrian civil war. But it's more than that too: a philosophically rich account of how Islamic theology might inflect the questions an ethnographer can ask.
Just out: Chunjie Zhang explores an exchange of philosophical traditions in the early twentieth century in which German philosophers turned to Chinese thought and Chinese philosophers turned to German traditions -- and the entwined conceptiosn of modernity that these encounters produced.
August 27, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Just out: Chunjie Zhang explores an exchange of philosophical traditions in the early twentieth century in which German philosophers turned to Chinese thought and Chinese philosophers turned to German traditions -- and the entwined conceptiosn of modernity that these encounters produced.
Just out: May Hawas and Bruce Robbins have put together a terrific, and admirably international collection, called "Teaching Politically." Nobody needs me to say how important a topic this is at the moment.
July 30, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Just out: May Hawas and Bruce Robbins have put together a terrific, and admirably international collection, called "Teaching Politically." Nobody needs me to say how important a topic this is at the moment.
Just out: Rose Casey's sparkling account of the ways postcolonial literature has generated conceptual capacities for thinking in fresh ways about property law. A really fine account of the interplay between aesthetics and politics, especially beyond North American and European legal traditions.
July 23, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Just out: Rose Casey's sparkling account of the ways postcolonial literature has generated conceptual capacities for thinking in fresh ways about property law. A really fine account of the interplay between aesthetics and politics, especially beyond North American and European legal traditions.
Just out: Lauren Shizuko Stone on the queerness of German children's literature -- and how it imagines temporality in ways that challenge the anglophone discourse on that question. I hope some non-Germanists will take this up too - it's a fascinating account.
June 12, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Just out: Lauren Shizuko Stone on the queerness of German children's literature -- and how it imagines temporality in ways that challenge the anglophone discourse on that question. I hope some non-Germanists will take this up too - it's a fascinating account.
Just out: a final (alas) book by the brilliant anthropologist Rafael Sanchez that's quite a bit more than what the subtitle calls a memoir. It's a very personal acount of coming to terms with the ugliness of patriarchy, as well as the possibility of politics he found in the plazas of Venezuela.
May 19, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Just out: a final (alas) book by the brilliant anthropologist Rafael Sanchez that's quite a bit more than what the subtitle calls a memoir. It's a very personal acount of coming to terms with the ugliness of patriarchy, as well as the possibility of politics he found in the plazas of Venezuela.
Another book I didn't sponsor myself but wish I had: Andrea Moore on new music and memorialization. She's interested both in the question of who is, as Butler would say, grievable, as well as in how music thinks memory in ways that language -- or even the conventional languages of music -- don't.
April 24, 2025 at 2:06 PM
Another book I didn't sponsor myself but wish I had: Andrea Moore on new music and memorialization. She's interested both in the question of who is, as Butler would say, grievable, as well as in how music thinks memory in ways that language -- or even the conventional languages of music -- don't.
Those who know Roz Morris as a brilliant scholar whose work moves between anthropology, philosophy, and literary studies, may know that she's also a superb poet. This book (which I didn't sponsor myself) shows the range of her talents.
April 23, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Those who know Roz Morris as a brilliant scholar whose work moves between anthropology, philosophy, and literary studies, may know that she's also a superb poet. This book (which I didn't sponsor myself) shows the range of her talents.
Glad to be at SCMS for the first time. Come say hi if you’re here.
April 3, 2025 at 9:58 PM
Glad to be at SCMS for the first time. Come say hi if you’re here.
A fabulous entry in our new film series. For Jules O'Dwyer, the hotel is not just a setting but bound up with the techniques of cinema itself in its orchestration of space, its practices of labor, and its deleneation of the public and the private. Fun and fascinating.
April 2, 2025 at 4:29 PM
A fabulous entry in our new film series. For Jules O'Dwyer, the hotel is not just a setting but bound up with the techniques of cinema itself in its orchestration of space, its practices of labor, and its deleneation of the public and the private. Fun and fascinating.
Just out: a reissue of a classic, with a fine new preface. Butler's the best.
March 27, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Just out: a reissue of a classic, with a fine new preface. Butler's the best.
Elena Gorfinkel and JD Rhodes offer a theory of the film prop, from Sirk's bric-a-brac, to sexploitation's living rooms, to Risky Business's crystal egg, and beyond. This is the first in a new series of short books for cinephiles, examining a single object, technique, or motif across film history.
March 5, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Elena Gorfinkel and JD Rhodes offer a theory of the film prop, from Sirk's bric-a-brac, to sexploitation's living rooms, to Risky Business's crystal egg, and beyond. This is the first in a new series of short books for cinephiles, examining a single object, technique, or motif across film history.
Just out: Isabelle Boni-Claverie's searing account of anti-Black racism in France -- and also, more briefly, the United States. Boni-Claverie's documentary film on the topic is also highly recommended.
February 19, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Just out: Isabelle Boni-Claverie's searing account of anti-Black racism in France -- and also, more briefly, the United States. Boni-Claverie's documentary film on the topic is also highly recommended.
Just out: Jan Overwijk tackles cybernetic rationalism within capitalism. A fine way of thinking two distinct traditions -- systems theory and critical theory -- together, while expanding the horizons of both. With thanks to Bruce Clarke and Henry Sussman for sponsoring the book in Meaning Systems.
February 7, 2025 at 4:25 PM
Just out: Jan Overwijk tackles cybernetic rationalism within capitalism. A fine way of thinking two distinct traditions -- systems theory and critical theory -- together, while expanding the horizons of both. With thanks to Bruce Clarke and Henry Sussman for sponsoring the book in Meaning Systems.
Amid the horrors, books. Liesl Yamaguchi takes on synesthesia between the way artists and scientists formulated it (which wasn't always so distinct as it is now). A wonderful addition to our Verbal Arts series -- thanks to Haun Saussy and Lazar Fleishman for sponsoring it there.
January 29, 2025 at 4:39 PM
Amid the horrors, books. Liesl Yamaguchi takes on synesthesia between the way artists and scientists formulated it (which wasn't always so distinct as it is now). A wonderful addition to our Verbal Arts series -- thanks to Haun Saussy and Lazar Fleishman for sponsoring it there.
Just out: a terrific edited collection that draws on the supposedly contradictory insights of Marxism and deconstruction to reinvent the opposition between translation and universality. Gavin Arnall, Katie Chenoweth, and some terrific contributors expand the possibilities of politics.
January 15, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Just out: a terrific edited collection that draws on the supposedly contradictory insights of Marxism and deconstruction to reinvent the opposition between translation and universality. Gavin Arnall, Katie Chenoweth, and some terrific contributors expand the possibilities of politics.