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.
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.
Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Wendy Brown, Lee Edelman, Joan Scott, Rey Chow, and Camille Robcis for blurbing it (the latter three blurbs are to be found inside.)
October 29, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Wendy Brown, Lee Edelman, Joan Scott, Rey Chow, and Camille Robcis for blurbing it (the latter three blurbs are to be found inside.)
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.
Back cover. Many thanks to Anne Norton and Uday Mehta for the blurbs and to Jacques Lezra and Paul North for sponsoring it for Idiom.
September 16, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Back cover. Many thanks to Anne Norton and Uday Mehta for the blurbs and to Jacques Lezra and Paul North for sponsoring it for Idiom.
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.
Back cover. Many thanks to Talal Asad and Amira Mittermaier for the blurbs and to Clara Han, Bhrigupati Singh, and Andrew Brandel for sponsoring it for Thinking from Elsewhere.
September 3, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Back cover. Many thanks to Talal Asad and Amira Mittermaier for the blurbs and to Clara Han, Bhrigupati Singh, and Andrew Brandel for sponsoring it for Thinking from Elsewhere.
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.
Here's the back cover. Thanks to Ban Wang and Glenn Perry for blurbing it and to Jacques Lezra and Paul North for sponsoring it for Idiom.
August 27, 2025 at 2:56 PM
Here's the back cover. Thanks to Ban Wang and Glenn Perry for blurbing it and to Jacques Lezra and Paul North for sponsoring it for Idiom.
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.
Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Chris Newfield and Caroline Levine for blurbing it.
July 30, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Chris Newfield and Caroline Levine for blurbing it.
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.
Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Angela Naimou for blurbing it.
July 23, 2025 at 3:31 PM
Here's the back cover. Many thanks to Angela Naimou for blurbing it.
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.
Here's the back cover. With thanks to Roz Morris for coordinating with Rafael as he wrote and translated the book across his final months, to Claudio Lomnitz, Igor Barreto, and Luis Pérez-Oramas for their afterwords, and to Rihan Yeh, Javier Guerrero, and Charles Hirschkind for blurbing it.
May 19, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Here's the back cover. With thanks to Roz Morris for coordinating with Rafael as he wrote and translated the book across his final months, to Claudio Lomnitz, Igor Barreto, and Luis Pérez-Oramas for their afterwords, and to Rihan Yeh, Javier Guerrero, and Charles Hirschkind for blurbing it.
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.
Here's the back cover.
April 24, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Here's the back cover.
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.
Back cover herewith.
April 23, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Back cover herewith.
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.