Privacy Studies Podcast
Producer and host Natália da Silva Perez talks to guests about privacy from a historical perspective. Invited scholars come also from a range of disciplines beyond history, including law, social and computer sciences, communications, and philosophy. Lectures and seminars from the Centre for Privacy Studies are also featured in this show.
Each episode is accompanied by a transcript for accessibility (The transcripts are machine generated and may contain typos).
Season 4
The Portuguese Hebrew Nation in the Dutch Republic Debate on the Slave Trade - Interview with Yehonatan Elazar-DeMota
Yehonatan Elazar-DeMota is a rabbi and legal historian who specializes on the legal consciousness of the Portuguese Nation, an early modern Sephardic Jewish Community who came to live throughout the Western World in the wake of 1492. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. In this interview, we discuss his book Nação Legal Consciousness and its Contribution to the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic Debate on Slavery and the Slave Trade, where he explores the contributions of the Sephardim to legal-political discussions on ius naturae et gentium in early modern Amsterdam.
Listen to the podcast episode here: The Portuguese Hebrew Nation in the Dutch Republic Debate on the Slave Trade - Interview with Yehonatan Elazar-DeMota
Download the PDF Transcript of The Portuguese Hebrew Nation in the Dutch Republic Debate on the Slave Trade - Interview with Yehonatan Elazar-DeMota
Cunegonde Interrupts a Baptism Ceremony - Interview with Benjamin Kaplan
Ben Kaplan is a professor of Dutch History at UCL, with a comparative research profile focusing on religious history in early modern Europe. My colleague Johannes Ljungberg joins me as co-host in this interview about Ben's book Cunegonde's Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment. We discuss religious difference in interfaith marriages in the late 18th century, including lack of privacy within extended families.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Cunegonde Interrupts a Baptism Ceremony - Interview with Benjamin Kaplan
Download the PDF Transcript of Cunegonde Interrupts a Baptism Ceremony - Interview with Benjamin Kaplan
The Poison Trials - Interview with Alisha Rankin
Alisha Rankin is an associate professor of History at Tufts University. In this interview, recorded in the spring of 2021, Natacha Klein Käfer joins me as co-host to talk to Alisha about her book The Poison Trials : Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science.
Listen to the podcast episode here: The Poison Trials - Interview with Alisha Rankin
Download the PDF Transcript of The Poison Trials - Interview with Alisha Rankin
Season 3
Financial Accountability in France during the Reign of Louis XIV - Interview with Jacob Soll
Jacob Soll is Professor of Philosophy, History and Accounting at the University of Southern California. In this episode recorded in the summer of 2020, we talk about financial auditing practices, state secrets, and tensions between state transparency and state security during the old regime. Check out two of his books that focus on these topics: The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (2014), and The Information Master (2009).
Listen to the podcast episode here: Financial Accountability in France during the Reign of Louis XIV - Interview with Jacob Soll
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Financial Accountability in France during the Reign of Louis XIV - Interview with Jacob Soll pdf
Sex in an Old Regime City - Interview with Julie Hardwick
Julie Hardwick (University of Texas at Austin) talks about her newest book Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France 1660 - 1789, which came out with Oxford University Press in September 2020. In the book, she focuses on intimacy among young workers who lived in the urban environment of early modern Lyon, and makes extensive use of archival material to examine a topic highly relevant for privacy studies.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Sex in an Old Regime City - Interview with Julie Hardwick podcast
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Sex in an Old Regime City - Interview with Julie Hardwick
Season 2
Private Rights and the Common Good in Late Scholastic Thought
James Gordley argues that, in the writings of the late scholastics, private rights and the common good were in harmony, but modern liberalism disrupted this harmony. In his lecture, he explains how these ideas fit together.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Private Rights and the Common Good in Late Scholastic Thought
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Private Rights and the Common Good in Late Scholastic Thought pdf
Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany
Paolo Astorri, winner of the RefoRC Book Award 2020 for his book Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany, talks about the influence of theological ideas in the development of contract theory in 16th century Germany. In this interview, we cover how ideas by Reformers Martin Luther and Philip Melanchton were expanded, developed, and sometimes even distorted by theologians and jurists that came in their wake.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany pdf
Locating the Private in the Roman World
Andrew Riggsby gives a talk titled "Locating the Private in the Roman World." He explains that, despite their common use of explicit terms for “private” (and “public”), the ancient Romans did little to theorize those categories. In his talk, Andrew supplies such a theoretical account and points out ways in which the “private” was used as a tool of social control. Drawing from examples from the realms of domestic space and of financial regulation, he attends especially to gendered aspects of this control.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Locating the Private in the Roman World
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Locating the Private in the Roman World here
Locating the Cubiculum: Early Christian musings on the Place of Prayer
Mette Birkedal Bruun talks about the Gospel of Matthew, which presents Jesus introducing the Lord's Prayer with an injunction to enter into the chamber and close the door so as to pray in secret (Mt 6.6). For early Christian authors, this command elicited a series of questions: How to reconcile the entry into the chamber with the command to pray everywhere (cf 1 Tim 2)? Where and what is this chamber – not to mention its door? How are praying persons to comport themselves in the chamber under God's watchful eye? In this talk, Mette discusses third- and fourth-century expositions of Mt 6.6 and ponder their place in privacy studies.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Locating the Cubiculum: Early Christian musings on the Place of Prayer
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Locating the Cubiculum: Early Christian musings on the Place of Prayer here
From Rooftop to Chamber: Prayer in Jerome’s Rendering of the Book of Judith
Florian Wöller discusses the biblical book of Judith in a Latin rendering (4th c. AD) by the church father Jerome. This book tells the story of a courageous widow who saved Israel from the Assyrians by killing the Assyrian general Holofernes. In the oldest versions of the story, Judith prays on the roof of her house, but in Jerome's translation, she prays in a cubiculum. In this talk, Florian investigates Jerome's move of Judith's place of prayer, contextualizing it with further late antique notions of cubiculum prayer, and suggesting a reading of Judith's cubiculum as a private-public place of prayer.
Listen to the podcast episode here: From Rooftop to Chamber: Prayer in Jerome’s Rendering of the Book of Judith
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Prayer in Jerome’s Rendering of the Book of Judith here
Season 1
Privacy and Gender in Early Modern German Speaking Areas
Heide Wunder explores the emergence of modern "privacy“ or “Privatheit“ as a new concept of personal rights during the early modern period. She inspects evidence from printed sources such as funeral sermons, autobiographies and novels, which speak both to the spatial as well as to the gendered aspects of privacy.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Privacy and Gender in Early Modern German Speaking Areas
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Privacy and Gender in Early Modern German Speaking Areas here
Madame de Maintenon's "Petits livres secrets"
Lars Cyril Nørgaard talks about the private devotional practices of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV's second wife, to whom the king was married in secret.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Madame de Maintenon's "Petits livres secrets"
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Madame de Maintenon's "Petits livres secrets" here
Examining Privacy in Early Modern Letters
Michaël Green talks about Dutch egodocuments and his research on privacy.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Examining Privacy in Early Modern Letters
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Examining Privacy in Early Modern Letters here
Introducing the Centre for Privacy Studies
Mette Birkedal Bruun talks about her research on the history of privacy and the work at the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Listen to the podcast episode here: Introducing the Centre for Privacy Studies
Download the text transcript (PDF) of Introducing the Centre for Privacy Studies here