Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a book about change. The Jola, a people living in Guinea-Bissau, have long cultivated rice and formed their social identity around its growth, but recent changes in climate, economic, political and social circumstances have rendered this a precarious existence. As a result, individuals from the village where Prof. Joanna Davidson has spent years conducting in-depth ethnog...
Nov 08, 2018•58 min
A searching and richly textured history of the affinities and common origins of Latin American and North American liberation theologies, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press 2018) dives into the work of thinkers who understood that theology must must have something to offer to people suffering under oppressive systems. By offering sharp readings of the ideas of Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, Rosemary Ruether and many others, Lilian Calles...
Nov 07, 2018•55 min
Pragmatism is a longstanding philosophical idiom that advocates public-facing philosophy – philosophy that abandons merely academic puzzles and addresses itself to the social and political problems of the day. This commitment is perhaps most firmly manifest in John Dewey. Unsurprisingly, Dewey wrote extensively in social and political philosophy, focusing in particular on developing a conception of participatory democracy. Given his strong commitment to democracy, it is clear that Dewey is some ...
Nov 05, 2018•1 hr 5 min
What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert ‘s and Andrew Poe ‘s, and Austin Sarat ‘s unique collection of essays, The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press, 2018). In it, contributors discuss the political, social and personal “lives” of guns from a variety of perspectives. Join us to hear editors Obert and Poe help us consider new ways of thinking about American narratives of ballistic weapons. Steph...
Nov 01, 2018•32 min
Don Akenson , who is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, Ontario, is one of the most eminent scholars of Irish history. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2018; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) is the second of a projected three-book series of monographs that will explain how a new set of ideas about the church and the end of the world were developed among the A...
Nov 01, 2018•34 min
The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2018), Connie Chiang reveals hidden layers of the experiences of Japanese Americans interned by their government during the 1940s. Chiang, a professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College, argues...
Oct 31, 2018•53 min
While the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution in France has been widely studied, the return of survivors in the aftermath of deportation and genocide has not received sufficient attention. With Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Shannon Fogg , Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Missouri S&T, fills this void. Drawing from government archives, Jewish...
Oct 25, 2018•58 min
The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and it even cropped up in the British media as recently as...
Oct 18, 2018•51 min•Ep. 450
In The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), editors Robert Fink , Melinda Latour , and Zachary Wallmark curate a wide-ranging collection of essays about the function of tone and timbre in popular music. Comprised of four sections focused on genre, voice, instrument, and production, The Relentless Pursuit of Tone engages diverse popular music genres and employs varied theoretical and methodological approaches. The book begins with an ethnographic st...
Oct 12, 2018•1 hr 14 min
C. S. Lewis remains one of the most popular religious writers, and one of the most widely discussed children’s writers. I had the chance to catch up with Stephanie L. Derrick about her new book, The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America (Oxford University Press, 2018), and to talk about the many personalities and the changing reputation of her subject. Paying attention to the material circumstances of publication, while thinking about the ways in which reputa...
Oct 11, 2018•35 min
If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between these two Eurasian land empires had a decidedly romantic hue. As Elizabeth McGuire relates in the rich, persuasive and utterly engrossing Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2017), more than one generation of young Chinese people was swep...
Oct 08, 2018•1 hr 9 min
Interviewing one member of Congress is a feat for most researchers. Interviewing nearly 100 and almost every women member of Congress is remarkable. Even more remarkable is what we can learn from that data collection about the perceptions of women members of Congress, especially about the way they perceive recent partisan polarization and the changing role of gender, race, and ethnicity. Such is the exhaustive project of Kelly Dittmar , Kira Sanbonmatsu , and Susan J. Carroll , who are the autho...
Oct 08, 2018•22 min
According to a long tradition in political philosophy, there are certain conditions under which citizens may rightly disobey a law enacted by a legitimate political authority. That is, it is common for political philosophers to recognize the permissibility of civil disobedience, even under broadly just political conditions. There are, of course, longstanding debates over how to distinguish civil from uncivil disobedience, what forms civil disobedience may take, and the difference between civil d...
Oct 01, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Samuel Helfont ‘s Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018) makes an invaluable contribution to an understanding of Iraqi strongman’s Saddam Hussein harnessing of Islam in support of his Baathist regime and ideology and to ensure that Islam as a social institution is incapable of turning against him. In doing so, Helfont also contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of religious legitimization of autocratic and ill...
Oct 01, 2018•57 min
Religious music can be a source of comfort and release, but also a remembrance of sadness and loss. In Sense and Sadness: Syriac Chant in Aleppo (Oxford University Press, 2018), Tala Jarjour analyzes the Syriac chant sung in Aramaic used by the small Christian Suriyani community in Aleppo, Syria. The Suriyani are part of the Syrian Orthodox Church of the Antioch. Taking a multi-pronged approach, Jarjour undertakes a rigorous musical analysis of the Passion liturgy, while at the same time explain...
Sep 28, 2018•47 min
What voices have been silenced in the history of the Holocaust? How did victims and perpetrators make sense of their experiences? How did the failed pursuit of post-war justice shape public memory? In her new book Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mary Fulbrook uses diaries, memoirs, and trials to recover the full spectrum of suffering and guilt. By exposing the disconnect between official myths and unspoken realities of post-war ...
Sep 27, 2018•56 min
Dr. Joshua Sharfstein has learned a lot as from his years of experience as a public health leader. He has dealt with everything from a rabid raccoon, to protestors, to potentially losing refrigeration on the city of Baltimore’s stock of vaccines. And now he has turned the insight gained from all these experiences into a guidebook for public health officials. The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times (Oxford University Press, 2018) details not just how to ...
Sep 21, 2018•42 min
Ruth Gamble ’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tradition in Tibet, and the life of the Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorjé (1284-1339). In this book, Gamble gives an account of Rangjung Dorjé’s life based on his autobiographical liberation stories and songs, connecting him to the teaching and practice lineages with which he was involved, the communities t...
Sep 21, 2018•42 min
Historically ubiquitous at least since the 15th century and integral to the rise and consolidation of capitalism, land dispossession has re-emerged as a hot button issue for governments, industries, social movements and researchers. In his first book Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (Oxford University Press 2018), M ichael Levien explores the causes and consequences of India’s land wars in the contemporary neoliberal period. He distinguishes between dispossession...
Sep 20, 2018•55 min
Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) is a dramatic and vibrant story of a little-known Kentucky school, the Choctaw Academy. Christina Snyder , McCabe-Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, argues that this short-lived institution represented both the promise of a multi-ethnic American society, as well as the withering of that dream during the era of Jacksonian Democracy and Indian Removal. Snyder presents several characters, including...
Sep 18, 2018•56 min
A scientific ontology is a view about what a scientific theory says exists. Longstanding philosophical debate on this issue divides into two broad camps: anti-realists, who think scientific theories are committed to the existence only of those things that can be observed, and realists, who hold that these theories are also committed to unobservables, such as subatomic particles. In Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 201...
Sep 17, 2018•1 hr 3 min
Joseph Ben Prestel talks with us about Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2017), blending together history of emotions, urban history, global history, and comparative history to produce a monograph on the similar effects urban change had on Cairo and Berlin: ordinary citizens, between 1860 and 1910, negotiated between how the city was changing and how that affected how they saw love, honor, and trust. We talk about what we can gain ...
Sep 12, 2018•56 min
In the 6th century CE, the Roman emperor Justinian embarked upon a series of wars that seemed to herald the restoration of the Roman empire in the western Mediterranean. In his book Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Heather recounts the campaigns of Justinian’s armies and the factors that made them possible. As Heather explains, the Roman imperial state in the 6th century was one focused mainly upon the waging of war, though for all of ...
Sep 10, 2018•57 min
There’s been a lot written about the Tea Party, but nothing focused on members of Congress like the new book, Reactionary Republicans: How the Tea Party in the House Paved the Way for Trump’s Victory (Oxford University Press, 2018) by Bryan T. Gervais and Irwin L. Morris . Gervais is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at the University of Texas at San Antonio; Morris is professor and chair of the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Mar...
Sep 10, 2018•22 min
Harold Morales , an associate professor of Religion at Morgan State University, is the author of the momentous new book, Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority (Oxford University Press, 2018). Morales’ monograph provides a rich ethnographic analysis of various Latino Muslim communities, groups, and individuals in America. Situated in the context of hyper-racialization of post 9/11, Morales carefully lays out his interlocutors’ powerful journeys of reversio...
Sep 03, 2018•44 min
Melani McAlister ’s The Kingdom of God Has No Borders (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a global history of evangelicals since 1945 and focuses on the complexities and contradictions that encompass the modern evangelical movement in the U.S. as it looks at the rest of the world. McAlister begins by examining the impact of the civil rights movement in the United States and the decolonization of much of the Global South to show how evangelical Christians tried to respond to a changing world. In d...
Aug 24, 2018•59 min
Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the ultra-rich, among others. While these arguments focus on the macro problems that contribute to growing inequality, they overlook one innocuous but substantial contributor to the widening divide: the explosion of fees accompanying virtuall...
Aug 23, 2018•39 min•Ep. 116
Ben Epstein ’s new book, The Only Constant is Change: Technology, Political Communication, and Innovation over Time (Oxford University Press, 2018), traces communication changes and innovations in the United States from the time of the Founding to the present, while also exploring how and where innovative use of communication becomes viable for political actors. Epstein connects a number of threads within the book, including a qualitative approach to communications studies that makes use of the ...
Aug 22, 2018•45 min
For the most part women in the classical world have suffered from what Duane W. Roller terms “near-invisibility,” obscuring the consequential roles that at times they played in government and politics. In his book Cleopatra’s Daughter: And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), Roller recounts the lives of more than a half-dozen women in the last decades of the 1st century BC and early decades of the 1st century AD to show how they exercised power during the early...
Aug 10, 2018•42 min
The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infection, disease, and pandemic they have helped shape human culture and civilization. In her book Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History (Oxford University Press, 2018), Dorothy H. Crawford details how changes in the way humans lived, spanning from hunter-gatherer to modern crowding and air travel, have been affected and shaped by the microb...
Aug 09, 2018•48 min
