About Interventions | The Intellectual History Podcast
What do intellectual historians currently investigate? And why is this relevant for us today? These are some of the questions our podcast series, led by graduate students at the University of Cambridge, seeks to explore. It aims to introduce intellectual historians and their work to everyone with an interest in history and politics. Do join in on our conversations!
Should you judge a book by its cover? Victorian historians and their readers did; and through examining the decisions that went into binding, titling, annotating and prefacing historical works, we can recover some of the anxieties and labour that went into creating the image of the historian we have today.
This is Elise Garritzen's task, in 'Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England: Books, the Literary Marketplace, and the Scholarly Persona': a work which draws on over 500 nineteenth-century publications to shed light on the struggle to impose a respectable order on the chaos of history. Hosted by Joshua Shortman
30 Mar 2026
Plato’s Political Ideas: From Limited Rule to Tyranny (with Melissa Lane)
Who will rule the rulers? Who will chaperone the chaperones? Who will guard the guardians? These questions are rarely associated with Plato. Usually seen as the arch-defender of the rule of the enlightened few over the ignorant many, he has not been perceived as a friend of accountable government. But is this traditional picture of Plato true?
Melissa Lane, the world’s foremost interpreter of Plato’s political thought, thinks not. Far from being blind to the need to hold political leaders to account, Plato was in fact deeply invested in developing a system of limited rule in which the order of offices would be directed to the good of the ruled.
Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall
Produced by Joshua Shortman
10 Feb 2026
Sketching Characters: from Ancient Moralists to the Mansplainer (with Katie Ebner-Landy)
Theophrastus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He wrote widely on topics including metaphysics, plant-life, dizziness, odours, and juice. Most notably, though, he was the author of a colourful text detailing the vices of thirty typical characters from Athenian city life. The impact of this short book of sketches, known simply as Characters, was prodigious. In early modern Europe, it spawned an entire tradition of character sketching and character classifying which, for a period of some two hundred years, formed a central current in the great stream of moral and political philosophy.
Join Katie Ebner-Landy, author of the path-breaking Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types, as she uncovers the history of Theophrastus’s peculiar work, revealing a forgotten way of doing moral philosophy, one centred not on hidden principles but the characterisation of personality. Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall and Joshua Shortman
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
4.8 / 5
16 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
25 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 37 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
37
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
92
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