The Best Scholarly Books of 2024

What could it mean to be convinced by this? Taylor rejects the idea that we might distinguish between the kinds of conviction inspired by poetry and philosophy by considering the former to name a purely aesthetic experience, “because intellectual reflection … can alter, refine, develop the actual experience.” If poetry is different from theology or philosophy, it is not because its claim on us is less total; its work is not restricted to some narrow part of ourselves we call “aesthetic.”

In language that recalls his earlier work on phenomenology, Taylor suggests that the experiences provided by a poem like Wordsworth’s offer us a lens through which previously obscure aspects of the world come to light. Conviction is not so much a matter of correspondence between the poem’s images and our previous understanding of reality; it is like a name that renders apprehensible fugitive aspects of existence. Just as learning a term like “indignation” allows us to discern and express an emotional state that we couldn’t quite get a hold of without it, so the poetic symbol invites us to look at the world through it, and to register perceptions and actions of which we were previously incapable.

Taylor is attuned to the “fragility” of the insights offered by Romantic poetry. Unlike a religious ritual or a philosophical proposition, the poetic symbol isn’t embedded in a coherent picture of the world. And as every teacher of poetry knows, it is impossible to prove the value of lines such as Wordsworth’s. The most one can do is invite the student in, clear her way, give her the possibility of becoming convinced by the intimation of a world different from the mechanical, demystified spaces inhabited by the reigning disciplines and bureaucracies of the modern university.

Michael W. Clune is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University.

But for almost a century, evolutionary biology has labored in the thrall of the Modern Synthesis, a paradigm that largely reduces evolutionary theory to genetics and excludes developmental and ecological factors as irrelevant to the story. According to the Modern Synthesis, the changes that an organism undergoes in the course of an individual lifetime can never be inscribed in the genes and therefore have no effect on evolutionary transformation. Living beings, according to this longstanding doctrine, are the passive objects of natural selection: Adaptation happens purely as a result of natural selection acting upon random genetic variations.

The authors of Evolution Evolving, who call their new paradigm the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” thoroughly demolish this dogma. They show that organisms inherit myriad things besides genes, including vital microorganisms, epigenetic structures that fundamentally affect gene expression, and cultural forms such as behaviors, communication systems, built structures, and ecological niches. By acting in the world, engaging with one another, teaching and learning, developing new behaviors, and constructing new niches, living things shape the environments in which natural selection acts upon them so that genetic evolution follows extra-genetic inheritance and is inseparable from developmental biology and ecology. Readers of this book will learn about the inherited microorganisms that allow the Mojave woodrat to feast on the toxic “creosote bush,” the diverse cultural forms of humpback whales and chimpanzees, and the various parenting approaches of different species of birds, and what happens when they adopt children of a different species, among other examples of extra-genetic inheritance and its essential importance to the evolutionary process.

Denying the agency of living beings has not been a purely intellectual mistake; it has informed two centuries of environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Evolution Evolving defines a powerful new approach: anti-reductive, pluralist, founded in a recognition of the agency of organisms and a creative fascination with its manifold modes of expression.

Jessica Riskin is a professor of history at Stanford University.

For the most part, colonial and postcolonial subjects have been compelled to approach Western humanistic education instrumentally to advance in a world designed to serve metropolitan desires: Majumdar recounts the “slow, tedious violence” of his own university training in literature in India, the “anxiety” generated by a craving for cosmopolitan literature “of being irresponsible young people” in a postcolonial nation where the responsible thing to do was to become a doctor or engineer. But, he discerns, a certain type of autodidact, across different periods and geographies of the British empire, emerged alongside this dominant, strategic mode of engaging with Western literature: individuals whose frustration with that mode led to new and aesthetically productive ways of reading and, ultimately, their emergence as popular intellectuals in their own right.

Focusing on Black intellectuals in apartheid-era South Africa, 20th-century Caribbean authors, and colonial and postcolonial South Asian writers, Majumdar recounts the “eclectic, often confused and misdirected adventures with books” that gave the world thinkers such as Daniel Coleman, Peter Abrahams, Njabulo Ndebele, Dionne Brand, Jamaica Kincaid, C.L.R. James, Toru Dutt, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, and Pankaj Mishra. Recounting their unique patterns of intellectual self-formation, their amateur navigation of a metropolitan canon from the empire’s peripheries, Majumdar approaches these thinkers and their work as a seasoned literary scholar, while also putting his talents as a prolific novelist to brilliant use: The book narrates its protagonists’ lives, and their own accounts of their reading and self-making, with care and sensitivity, in a model of the empathetic mode of analysis at the core of any form of humanistic study.

Majumdar’s often-searing and bittersweet stories of amateur readings from the colonial and postcolonial world also offer important lessons for debates about the humanities in the United States and the United Kingdom today, including the costs of deep professionalization of literary study. Echoing Edward Said, he reminds us of the critical role of passionately engaged and innovative “amateur” intellectuals outside the halls of a scholarly establishment too easily co-opted by the interests of power. In a time of endless disputes about inclusion of colonial-era texts in syllabi, Majumdar optimistically reminds us of the unpredictable and generative ways in which readers have interpreted works from distant cultures in the past. The Amateur is a beautifully written scholarly book on the limits of scholarly reading and writing.

Priya Satia is a professor of history at Stanford University.

A generation of scholarship has attributed the first use of gender terminology to refer to the relationship of human psychosocial identity to sexed anatomy to the medical researcher John Money’s work with intersex and trans patients at the Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s. Breen’s book shines a light on the milieu from which that sense of gender actually emerged. It’s not just that gender owes an overlooked debt to Mead’s notion of “sex roles,” or that she and Bateson toyed with an early version of transgender theory in the first flush of their heady romance. It’s that gender, cybernetics, and LSD all share a common point of departure in the crucible of Cold War science, as the United States harnessed social theories about the transformability of the self to a global geopolitical clash. I’ll be jumping into all the rabbit holes this book opened up for me for a long, long time.

Susan Stryker is an emerita professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.

We know how this particular story ends, how the Russian Revolution gave way to the Stalinist Terror, but that outcome was hardly inevitable in the early years of the Soviet Union. Fore thus reclaims a lost period of tremendous innovation, which renders Soviet Factography an important intervention in our own present as well: Its recovery of documentary practices counts as an indirect riposte to the purveyors of disinformation today. Finally, it is a welcome reminder that the winds of revolution don’t only blow from the right.

Hal Foster is a professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University.

For the past half a decade, Fowler has been at the epicenter of England’s culture wars, the subject of unrelenting attacks from those who are threatened by her re-evaluation of Britain’s imperial history. In response, she remains admirably calm, gracious, and collaborative. On each of her 10 walks, she joins a writer or activist with a personal connection to the location’s colonial past, which they unpack along the way. It’s a model of how to communicate scholarly insights to a wider public: You can even use it as a practical guide and retrace the walks yourself.

Fara Dabhoiwala is a senior research scholar and professor of history at Princeton University.

The editor Mark Solms’s answer is forthright. The language of German science in Freud’s time tended toward the colloquial, where Anglophone scientific culture tends toward Latinized namings. Strachey chose to translate Freud to make him sound like a British scientist. The choice might have gone otherwise, but by now it is standard usage. With one notable exception — translating Trieb as “drive” rather than “instinct” — Solms chose to honor Strachey’s choices. I find this choice admirable in its clarity and steadfastness, and it is enormously helpful in so many ways (though I suspect I would have made a different choice). The RSE also includes informative entries about each contested term as well as phrases that have been subject to many translations and interpretations. This is an invaluable contribution. One can read through the history of the debates for oneself, and they are now all in one place. In addition, RSE contains approximately 50 pieces of writing by Freud that were left out of the original Standard Edition. Some of them contain his views on homosexuality — which were progressive for his time — and some contain his negative views of America, which were previously omitted. Over all, the RSE is a treasure.

Jonathan Lear is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Unsurprisingly, the children of the elite get far more attentive care. Gong finds that, in this context, families often get in the way of recovery. When opportunities arise for their loved ones to make social connections — say, through a job at a local chain restaurant — parents intervene. Counterintuitively, while those from the streets find themselves with significant freedoms after being housed, those from elite backgrounds are almost relentlessly surveilled, under what Gong calls a system of “concerted constraint.” Those constraints limit the deeper social connections people need, hindering improvement in their overall mental health.

In Gong’s telling, the 20th-century asylum has been replaced by tolerant containment for the poor and concerted constraint for the rich. The former enjoy lots of freedom with little improvement; the latter are disciplined into a form of respectability that is a different kind of straitjacket. The middle class, unable to afford thousands of dollars in private care and too well-off for housing-first programs, receive little from the institution meant to serve them: commercial insurance.

Gong’s book is full of beautiful and haunting scenes. He resists but does not reject the kinds of lazy accounts that can frequent sociology (“it’s all just capitalism!”). In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics we learn how everyone is harmed by our approach to mental health and how, for all their differences, both rich and poor sufferers of mental-health conditions are failed by the society they live in.

Shamus Khan is a professor of sociology and American studies at Princeton University.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that 2024 was a good year for scholarly work on letters. There was the publication of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2024), an invaluable resource for a poet whose letters and lyric interpenetrate one another, and Andrew Stauffer’s Byron: A Life in Ten Letters (Cambridge University Press, 2024). But the most important book in this category was surely the ninth volume of The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge), edited by Louise Curran, George Justice, and Sören Hammerschmidt.

No author’s letters have a better claim to our attention than those of Richardson, the greatest of epistolary novelists. Astonishingly, for more than two centuries, scholars had to rely on the 1804 Correspondence, edited by the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Barbauld worked quickly and freely, marking up the original manuscripts in green ink before dispatching them to the printers, and criticisms of the volume’s omissions and inaccuracies were made almost immediately.

It was not until 2013, however, that a magisterial new edition began to appear under general editors Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor. Unlike many editions of letters, it is organized around exchanges, including letters from Richardson’s correspondents. As a result, the reader can see each dialogue unfold, with help from truly heroic textual editing and excellent notes. In the latest volume, the exchanges center on Richardson’s masterpieces, Pamela and Clarissa. They include a poem on Pamela by “a young miss not 12 years old,” a negative verdict on Pamela’s third volume by the thresher poet Stephen Duck (“what I wanted,” Richardson replies petulantly, was notice of “particular faults, which I might correct”), and a breathless fan letter from the actor Colley Cibber on Clarissa (“O Lord! Lord! Can there be any thing yet to come that will trouble this smooth stream of pleasure I am bathing in”).

Reading the 1804 edition of Richardson’s correspondence, Samuel Taylor Coleridge found him “oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious.” The new edition reveals a novelist who is intensely alive to the pressures and pleasures of his social network. It is a portrait that is at once immensely sympathetic and eerily familiar.

Julianne Werlin is an associate professor of English at Duke University.

Streeck rose to academic prominence as an economic sociologist with a particular focus on labor in advanced industrial societies, including in his native Germany. He retired as director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, in Cologne, Germany, in 2014. In the decade since, he has become widely known in Anglophone circles as the foremost public intellectual diagnosing the myriad failures of “globalism” — the ideology and institutionalization of hyper-globalization. Streeck’s particular focus is the political economy of contemporary capitalism, which in his telling has pitted economic liberalization against political democracy and thereby generated recurrent structural crises.

Taking Back Control offers a masterful synthesis of this previous work, pulling together themes from his analysis of financialization and debt, the Eurozone crisis and the problems of the European Union, globalization and its necessary democratic deficits, centralization and the scale of democratic states, sovereignty and borders, and more. Streeck provides a conceptual and historical framework through which to understand the rise and fall of the neoliberal era, which we can date from roughly the mid-'70s to the present, with its major acceleration and pivot coming with the end of the Cold War. Evoking John Maynard Keynes and especially Karl Polanyi, he has aimed this book at a general academic audience and with the ambition of providing a lasting statement on these questions. The result is highly readable but without sacrificing conceptual sophistication or institutional-historical detail.

Streeck repudiates the ideal of global governance that Mike Moore, former director-general of the World Trade Organization, praised as a “world without walls.” Taking Back Control ends with a provocative and bracing “set of propositions” that offers a no-holds-barred critique of globalism and a defense of a system of sovereign states as the only bulwark against the growing failures of neoliberalism. Streeck’s criticism may unsettle readers who have wanted to imagine the “world without walls” as a progressive advance of human freedom.

The last decade has not been kind to that vision. All around the world, the walls are now coming back up. Streeck’s book helps us to understand why — as well as what might come next, if we were to think more carefully about our present predicament.

David Singh Grewal is a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Moon is concerned instead with the “shards” of Wedgwood’s career, a metaphor that emphasizes frustrated ambition rather than success. No ceramicist makes a perfect pot every time. There is struggle. There are cracks. Moon resists art history’s infatuation with the metaphor of birth, as if the birth of anything — whether a vase or the Industrial Revolution — involved no pain or mess. Her captivating book recovers the weirdness of Wedgwood’s enterprise.

Moon’s approach appeals to me as an early modernist because she pays attention to her subject’s place within a longer history. In looking to classical antiquity for paradigms of perfection in ceramic form, Wedgwood was like so many men “full of hubris and fault” who “rediscovered” antiquity before him. Wedgwood’s famous antislavery medallion drew on that tradition. The object looks different when you see and hold it outside the display case. Like the ancient cameos and Renaissance medals that preceded it, the ceramic medallion’s physical qualities make a difference to how we perceive it. It is not a two-dimensional picture of a Black man in chains, it is a bas-relief sculpture, with a surface like skin. Melancholy Wedgwood itself is a beautiful object, with light blue pages that evoke the ceramicist’s most iconic color.

Two other great art-history books I read this year also attend to the life of shards. Jennifer Raab’s brilliant and movingly written book Relics of War: The History of a Photograph (Princeton University Press, 2024) centers one unassuming photograph of objects made and owned by imprisoned soldiers to tell a provocative story of violence, race, and truth during and after the American Civil War. In Freya Gowrley’s Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage (Princeton), the birth of collage — there’s that metaphor again — is wrested back from Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and delightfully queered as a mode of making that encompasses everything from shell grottoes to scrapbooks. Experimental biography, it seems, is a genre that has legs.

Marisa Anne Bass is a professor of the history of art at Yale University.

Peterson and Olson base the book on their decade of experience teaching anthropology graduate students to write research proposals. The book focuses heavily on conceptualizing a research project, more so than specific methods or proposal writing, per se. But by the end, researchers should have all the material they need to develop solid research and grant proposals. Indeed, many of the students in the authors’ courses have won prestigious grants to support their fieldwork. The process outlined in this book has been field-tested, revised, and refined based on the feedback of students and teachers; the design of the research process, as they explain it to the reader, is similarly iterative. In each chapter, they offer numerous examples from their colleagues’ research, putting into concrete terms what most skilled ethnographers might regard as “intuition” (and therefore, incapable of being formalized as it is in the book). Vivid examples walk readers through the process of identifying a new project’s core concepts, drawing out their multidimensionality and situating them within the scholarly literature — all while bringing these seemingly disparate elements (or dimensions) together into a cogent frame of inquiry.

In addition to communicating the significance of the collective, iterative, and creative dimensions of research design, Peterson and Olson also insist that the process be slow and deliberative — another way it pushes back against the ceaseless institutional demands for research productivity. Rest and reflection are an explicit part of the process: “We want you to take two days off before you begin the RD [research description] writing process,” the authors tell the reader. There is even a “postlude” concluding the book, titled “Resting, Reflecting, Preparing to Begin Anew.” That’s refreshing.

Adia Benton is an associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.