UChicagoReads: Spring 2025 New Releases from The University of Chicago Press

UChicagoReads features books written by UChicago staff, faculty, students, and alumni or those written about University topics. Do you know of a book we should feature? Do you have a book of your own? Email us at uchicagointranet@uchicago.edu.

Originally founded in 1890 as one of the three main divisions of the University of Chicago, The University of Chicago Press publishes books and journals with a mission “to disseminate scholarship of the highest standard and to publish serious works that foster public understanding, provide an authoritative foundation for informed dialogue, and enrich the diversity of cultural life.” Twice a year, The Press releases seasonal catalogs announcing new titles.

In this edition of UChicagoReads, we’re featuring three titles by UChicago faculty that appear in the Spring 2025 catalog. For more new releases from The Press, you can peruse the complete Spring 2025 catalog at your leisure.

Unforgiving Places

Jens Ludwig
© 2025 | 352 pages

Synopsis

What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong? A leading economist and head of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab has surprising answers. Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don’t, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.

Unforgiving Places is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

About the authors

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab. Ludwig received his MA and PhD in economics from Duke University. He is currently on the editorial board of the American Economic Review.

Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age

Ada Palmer
© 2025 | 768 pages

Synopsis

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer sets right the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

About the author

Ada Palmer is an associate professor of early modern European history and the college at the University of Chicago. Palmer completed her PhD and graduate teaching at Harvard University in 2009. Her research on intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is her way of exploring how history and thought shape each other over time.

A Democratic Theory of Truth

Linda M. G. Zerilli
© 2025 | 272 pages

Synopsis

We say that we live in a “post-truth” era because disinformation threatens our confidence in the existence of a shared public world. Affirming objective truth may, therefore, seem necessary to save democracy. According to political theorist Linda M. G. Zerilli, such affirmation can stifle political debate and silence dissent. In fact, Zerilli argues that the unqualified insistence on objective truth is as dangerous for democracy as denying it.

Drawing on Arendt, Foucault, and Wittgenstein, A Democratic Theory of Truth challenges the concept of truth presupposed by the post-truth debate. It argues that we, the people, have an essential role in discovering and evaluating any truth relevant to the political realm. The result is a striking defense of plurality, dissent, and opinion in contemporary democratic societies.

About the author

Linda M. G. Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Chicago. She was the 2010-16 Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she continues in her capacity as a leading scholar and teacher in the field. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a two-time Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow.