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In the best micro-historical tradition, Carlo Ginzburg, himself one of the founders and icons of this genre of historiography, dissects four moments of European intellectual history. This book relives the experience that participants in the Natalie Zemon Davis Lecture Series at the Budapest campus of Central European University had in 2019 listening to Ginzburg's eloquent and engaging discourses. For the purposes of this volume he has re-edited and completed the leporello of cases charged with the inherent ambiguity between secularism and religions.

Secularism is often identified with rejection or at least distancing from the sacred. However, if one assumes that secularism also appropriates and reworks the sacred, its ambiguities come to the fore. The dilemma accompanies the reception of La Boétie's Servitude volontaire between 1574 and today. Before Walter Benjamin, the lesser-known 19th-century Léon de Laborde defended the profanity of reproducing the arts. The tension around the secular pervades the case of the College de Sociologie (Paris, 1937-1939), an attempt to analyze the ideological components of fascism. The fourth lecture approaches a much-discussed contemporary phenomenon – fake news – from a long-term perspective. To what extent are some disturbing features of the world we live in the result of a long, tortuous, unpredictable trajectory?

The European Union has made remarkable, unprecedented advances in both external and internal security integration. "Epistemic communities" of ambassadors, military generals, scientists, and other experts who supersede national governments in the diplomacy of security decision making are taking advantage of their shared expertise, common culture, professional norms, and frequent meetings to forge new levels of collaboration. Mai'a K. Davis Cross brings together numerous personal interviews and recent government documents across five separate case studies to construct a microsociological account of how EU governance really works and what future role the EU is likely to play internationally.

A comic and melancholy novel about translation and living between cultures, set during one historic day in Spain: February 21, 1981, the attempted coup against the newborn Spanish democracy.

Early one morning in 1981, Peter Carp, an American poet and translator living in Granada, wakes to the sounds of shouting and the revving of a motorcycle. These interruptions to Peter’s sleep provoke a series of interrelated thoughts, delivered with wry humor, about personal relations in Spain, gossip, the role of women in a patriarchal society, and the after-effects of expelling the Jewish population from Spain in 1492. We are introduced to Peter’s associative view of the world as he draws on a lifetime of reading poetry, of making sense of his own Jewish sensibility, and how it relates to the cultural history of the Spain he has come to love for its music, people, food, and language. 

Peter lives in the home of Alberto, a professor of translation, who was once jailed under Franco’s regime. He has fallen in love with Ana, a young woman who is exploring the new freedoms of post-Franco Spain. Years ago, he had befriended flamenco singers of the Roma community, and his current task is to translate the flamenco lyrics he has collected, a process that challenges his understanding of Spanish and the capacity of language to convey meaning. His day brings him into contact with a wide range of Spaniards, including a gardener at the Alhambra, a group of children playing in the street, a professional beggar, a diverse range of personalities at a neighborhood bar before the midday dinner, and in the evening, a small band of fascist sympathizers encouraged by the attempted coup now taking place in the Spanish parliament.

With prose that mixes social observation, linguistic conjecture, and vivid description, Paul Hecht examines how living is itself a form of translation when moving from one language or culture to another, and how history can erupt into our own world. In Send Down Einstein, Hecht creates a tension between what we dream will happen and what actually does happen. In this bouillabaisse of emotion, the reader will taste how, for Peter Carp—with the right food and the best company—dreams, hope, and words can matter.

In 1937, Josef and Marie Baum, of Bamberg, Germany, sent their seventeen-year-old son Kurt to begin a new life in America. Their letters, provided here in both the original German and English translation, recount the story of this middle-class Jewish family during the Nazi era. Kurt’s struggles to adapt to his new circumstances were met with little understanding from his parents, who were enduring a steadily worsening existence at the hands of the Nazis. The father’s desperate pleas prior to his forced deportation and murder constitute a final rupture in this poignant story. 

Bridging the Holocaust experience from both sides of the Atlantic, Separated by Worlds sheds light both on life in Nazi Germany and on the refugee experience in the United States. Unlike traditional exile literature focused on intellectual and cultural elites, the book documents the experiences of average citizens navigating escape and assimilation. The fifty letters at the center of the book, which communicate the parents’ needs, fears, and hopes to their son, offer an unusually intimate window into daily life under Nazi rule. The book is richly illustrated, and the letters are annotated and contextualized by several essays.

Deftly merging political and social history, Serbia under the Swastika looks at the interactions between Germany’s occupation policies, the various forces of resistance and collaboration, and the civilian population. Alexander Prusin reveals a German occupying force at war with itself. Pragmatists intent on maintaining a sedate Serbia increasingly gave way to Nazified agencies obsessed with implementing the expansionist racial vision of the Third Reich. As Prusin shows, the increasing reliance on terror catalyzed conflict between the nationalist Chetniks, communist Partisans, and the collaborationist government. Prusin unwraps the winding system of expediency that at times led the factions to support one-another against the Germans--even as they fought a ferocious internecine civil war to determine the future of Yugoslavia.

Comprehensive and judicious, Serbia under the Swastika is a rare English-language foray into the still-fraught history of Serbia in World War II.

She Said NO investigates the gender inequality in the authority to speak—and therefore to refuse—that prevailed in the establishment and interpretation of the French classics. By selecting authors deemed essential to French cultural heritage and erasing the works of women writers, this biased canon has systematically undervalued female agency—even in well-known works by both men and women, such as Beauty and the Beast, The Princess of Clèves, and "Little Red Riding Hood." With this book, Jennifer Tamas fills a striking gap in early modern French studies by conceptualizing consent in a society where being a woman made it structurally difficult to say "no." Yet, women did refuse. The history Tamas explores is one of forgotten, erased, misunderstood, or inadmissible refusals, and how they have been obscured. The #MeToo movement has brought questions of female agency and consent to the fore, and this book retraces an "archive of refusal" to serve as a source of inspiration for contemporary feminist discourse and to change our reception of the French canon.