Nihilism in the 21st Century:A Conversation with Pankaj Mishra, Shruti Kapila and David Priestland

Shruti Kapila lectures at the Faculty of History and is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. Her publications include a co-edited special issue ‘Bhagavad Gita and Modern Thought,’ Modern Intellectual History (2010), and, as editor, An Intellectual History for India (2010).

Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia became the first book by a non-Western writer to win Germany’s prestigious Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Mishra regular contributes literary and political essays to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the New Yorker, London Review of Books and Bloomberg View.

David Priestland is Professor of Modern History at St Edmund Hall. His landmark overview of world communism, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World, was published in 2010. His following book, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power (2012), discussed the rise of market cultures in global history. He is now working on the history of market liberalism with special reference to the former communist world.