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International History and Politics
20 December 2024

HPI TOP FIVE BOOKS

As the festive season atmosphere fills the air, we asked the professors of the IHP Department to share their '5 Essential Reads' for students.  Their enthusiasm went above and beyond, as they also recommended their '5 Best Fiction Picks.' A thoughtful gift to accompany our holiday reading!

 

Gopalan Balachandran

Gopalan Balachandran

Scholar

  1. Ussama Makdisi - Age of Coexistence
  2. Rashid Khalidi - The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
  3. Isabella Hammad - Recognizing the Stranger
  4. Gary Okihiro - Pineapple Culture
  5. Amitav Ghosh - Smoke and Ashes

Fiction/Memoire

  1. Ismat Chugtai - A Life in Words
  2. Qurratulain Hyder - Ship of Sorrows
  3. Isabella Hammad - Enter Ghost
  4. Avi Shlaim - Three Worlds
  5. Lea Ypi - Free

Carolyn Biltoft

Scholar

  1. Robert Darnton - The Great Cat Massacre
  2. Stephen Kern - The Culture of Time and Space
  3. Paul Cohen - History in Three Keys
  4. Philippe Ariès - The Hour of Our Death
  5. Peter Brown - The Ransom of the Soul
  6. Lisa Lowe - The Intimacies of Four Continents
     

Fiction

  1. James Baldwin - Another Country
  2. Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift
  3. Anaïs Nin - The Four-Chambered Heart
  4. Milan Kundera - Ignorance
  5. Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground
Nicole Bourbonnais

NICOLE BOURBONNAIS

Scholar

  1. Julius S. Scott - The Common Wind
  2. Urvashi Butalia - The Other Side of Silence
  3. Cynthia Enloe - Bananas, Beaches, and Bases
  4. Michel-Rolph Trouillot - Silencing the Past
  5. Saidiya Hartman - Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Fiction

  1. Tanya Tagaq - Split Tooth
  2. Valeria Luiselli - Lost Children Archive
  3. George Lamming - In the Castle of My Skin
  4. Joseph Heller - Catch-22
  5. Bernhard Schlink - The Reader

RUI ESTEVES

Scholar

  1. Avner Greif - Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy
  2. Charles P. Kindleberger - Manias, Panics, and Crises
  3. Douglass C. North - Structure and Change in Economic History
  4. Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson - Globalization and History
  5. Jaime Reis - O atraso económico português

Fiction

  1. Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
  2. Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
  3. Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
  4. Aquilino Ribeiro - Quando os lobos uivam
  5. Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Jussi Hanhimaki

Jussi Hanhimäki

Scholar

  1. Anne Applebaum - Gulag
  2. John Lewis Gaddis - George Kennan
  3. Tony Judt - Postwar
  4. E.H. Carr - What is History?
  5. Mary Beard - SPQR

Fiction

  1. David Lodge - Changing Places
  2. Robert Harris - Archangel
  3. Mika Waltari - The Egyptian
  4. Alexandre Dumas - The Three Musketeers
  5. Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
B. Keo

Bernard Keo

Scholar

  1. Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
  2. Edward Said - Orientalism
  3. Su Lin Lewis - Cities in Motion
  4. Adam McKeown - Melancholy Order
  5. Ien Ang - On Not Speaking Chinese

Fiction

  1. Han Suyin - … And the Rain My Drink
  2. Graham Greene - The Quiet American
  3. Bao Ninh - The Sorrow of War
  4. Frederick Forsyth - The Day of the Jackal
  5. Agatha Christie - N or M?
Jan Kiely

Jan Kiely

Scholar

  1. Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln - Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf
  2. Henrietta Harrison - The Perils of Interpreting
  3. Gao Hua - How the Red Sun Rose
  4. Gail Hershatter - The Gender of Memory
  5. Lynn Hunt - Writing History in the Global Era

Fiction

  1. James Mooney - The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee
  2. George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
  3. Marc Bloch - L'étrange défaite
  4. Eileen Chang - Written on Water
  5. Margery Wolf - The House of Lim
Oksana M.

Oksana Myshlovska

Scholar

  1. Andreas Wimmer - Waves of War
  2. Tony Judt - Postwar
  3. Diana Dumitru - The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust
  4. Sarah Cameron - The Hungry Steppe
  5. Francine Hirsch - Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg

Biographical/Oral Histories/Fiction

  1. Serhiy Zhadan - The Orphanage
  2. Svetlana Alexievich - The Unwomanly Face of War
  3. Philippe Sands - East West Street
  4. Philippe Sands - The Ratline
  5. Andrey Kurkov - Grey Bees
D. Rdogno

DAVIDE RODOGNO (Selection 2024)

Scholar

  1. Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb - Epidemic Empire
  2. Arnaud-Dominique Houte - Les Peurs de la Belle Époque
  3. Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod - Language and the Politics of Emotions
  4. Ludovic Slimak - The Naked Neanderthal
  5. Karen V. Hansen - Encounter on the Great Plains

Fiction

  1. Masuji Ibuse - La Pluie Noire
  2. Alain Mabanckou - Le Commerce des Allongés
  3. Haruki Murakami - La città e le sue mura incerte
  4. Umberto Eco - Il Cimitero di Praga
Amalia Ribi Forclaz

Amalia Ribi Forclaz (influential as a historian in training)

Scholar

  1. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger - The Invention of Tradition
  2. James C. Scott - Weapons of the Weak
  3. Alfred W. Crosby - The Columbian Exchange
  4. Ann Laura Stoler - Along the Archival Grain
  5. Primo Levi - If This Is a Man

Fiction

  1. Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls
  2. Toni Morrison - Beloved
  3. Natalia Ginzburg - Family Sayings
  4. Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things
  5. Emile Zola - Germinal

 

AIDAN RUSSElL

Scholar

  1. Veena Das - Life and Words
  2. Minoru Hokari - Gurindji Journey
  3. Michel Kayoya - Sur les traces de mon père
  4. Achille Mbembe - On the Postcolony
  5. Luise White - Speaking with Vampires

Fiction

  1. Anon - The Saga of the People of Laxardal and Bolli Bollason's Tale
  2. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Wizard of the Crow
  3. Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds
  4. Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red
  5. W.G. Sebald - Austerlitz
Caroline Rusterholz

Caroline Rusterholz

Scholar

  1. Laura Briggs - How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics
  2. Ann Laura Stoler - Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
  3. Anna Clark - The Struggle for the Breeches
  4. Alison Bashford - Global Population
  5. Nikolas Rose - Inventing Our Selves

Fiction

  1. Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
  2. Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz
  3. Philippe Sands - East West Street
  4. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah
  5. Victor Hugo - L'Homme qui rit

 

 

Cyrus Schayegh

Scholar

  1. Robert Darnton - The Great Cat Massacre
  2. Jürgen Osterhammel - The Transformation of the World
  3. David Blackbourn - Marpingen
  4. Yuri Slezkine - The House of Government

Fiction

  1. John le Carré - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Mischa Suter

MISCHA SUTER

Scholar

  1. Carolyn Steedman - Landscape for a Good Woman
  2. Karl Marx - Capital, Vol. 1
  3. Susan Buck-Morss - Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
  4. Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks
  5. Joan W. Scott - Only Paradoxes to Offer

Fiction

  1. Olga Tokarczuk - Flights
  2. George Eliot - Middlemarch
  3. Adania Shibli - Minor Detail
  4. William Gibson - Neuromancer
  5. Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

 

 

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