New Books in Art

In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society. In this interview, Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Leonhard Emmerling about his book The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (Seagull Books, 2026)

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.

Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Alex Cain.

Dr Alex Cain researches in the fields of political theory and ethical theory, with a particular focus on the work of Hannah Arendt, among other figures in the history of philosophy. Her work in this field has so far mostly focussed on the topics of friendship, political action, judgement and the role of experience in philosophical inquiry.

They discuss Sidney Nolan’s duty to paint the concentration camps, the hopefulness of Hannah Arendt, and the importance of the banality of evil.

A transcript of this episode will be available on the Concept : Art website here.

Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
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This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network. In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-founder of the Replaying Communism project, which received funding from the AHRC SWW-DTP (2023) and the Visegrad Fund (2024). Dr. Jeffery's published research is on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó. Her monograph—Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process—was published by Ibidem in 2021, and, in 2022, she co-edited a special issue for Green Letters, entitled ‘A New Poetics of Space’.

This episode weaves together Beckett's transdisciplinary creative process with Dr. Jeffery's journey of research, and cogitation over challenges to preserve integrity and creativity of the author's works in the wake of rapidly developing AI tools. Furthermore, the colour blue occupies an integral role in Dr. Jeffery's monograph, so this episode entails analytical segments on pigments used in Beckett's works beyond the black, white, and grey. Dr. Jeffery and I also briefly discuss our ongoing special issue, "A Writer's Palette: Colour in Late Modernist Literature," for Textual Practice. Colleagues interested in sharing their proposal until 12th December, can write to us on latemodernists@gmail.com, for more details.
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Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often categorize their subjects as being motivated by one of two opposing notions: a wholehearted embrace of progress or an antimodernist nostalgia. A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026) centers a different kind of response to the period’s newly intensified awareness of temporality and history: an obsession with preserving perfection. Engaging a diverse set of case studies, Dr. Ellery E. Foutch explores the era’s desire to forestall the march of time and immortalize the fleeting moment through art and technology.

Beginning with an investigation of artist and naturalist Titian Peale’s butterfly illustrations and specimen boxes, Dr. Foutch assesses the implications of attempts to fix animal life in the “perfect state.” She then turns to Harvard’s Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, botanical models meticulously crafted to serve as instructional tools but most famous internationally as a spectacle for tourists. Finally, she scrutinizes the period’s preoccupation with the fragility of the human body, examining artistic representations of the legendary bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, widely known during his time as the “Perfect Man.” Highlighting the paradoxical way in which these attempts at preservation ultimately sap the vitality from the organic processes they seek to arrest, Dr. Foutch uses these curious objects to unpack a deep set of cultural anxieties around decay and death.

By analyzing objects of mass culture and natural history using methods typically reserved for works of art, A Perfectionist Impulse provides a unique window into how nineteenth-century scientists, technologists, artists, and entertainers rendered a common desire for perfection and immortality. Itself a wondrous collection of attempts to capture the idealized moment, this extensively illustrated book serves as a shining example of our enduring fascination with the ephemeral.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2024) examines one of the most revered art historical narratives of Western
art: the famous turning point for painting and sculpture usually
emblematized by the works of Édouard Manet and then the Impressionists.
Instead of the usual revaluation of this turning point, Sara Pappas
argues for the importance of the failure to find a cohesive story for
the art world in the period itself, a difficulty that carries forward to
galleries today. In order to demonstrate the importance of incongruity
and disorder, Pappas brings together two worlds that may seem
incompatible: nineteenth-century literary writers involved in naturalism
and the organization of permanent collections of later
nineteenth-century French art in today's museums. Drawing on the art
novels and art criticism of these writers, the book provides optimal
access to the questions that continue to haunt the categorization and
display of nineteenth-century art.

Guest Sara Pappas is Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture
at the University of Richmond. In addition to this volume, she has
published articles on topics from 19th century art criticism by literary figures such as Baudelaire and Zola to the Expositions universelles
to contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s influence on French art, as well
as co-curating an exhibit of Nineteenth Century French and Russian Art
at the Harnett Museum of Art.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of
Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and
speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism
to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan
France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under
review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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