A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism. The 1970s was a decade of "subversives". Faced with various progressive and revolutionary social movements, the forces of order--politicians, law enforcement, journalists, and conservative intellectuals--saw subversives everywhere. From indigenous peasant armies and gay liberation organizations, to anti-nuclear activists and Black liberation militants, subversives challenged aut...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Ep 491•Transcript available on Metacast The Nature of Christian Doctrine: Its Origins, Development, and Function (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a groundbreaking account of the origins, development, and enduring significance of Christian doctrine, explaining why it remains essential to the life of Christian communities. Noting important parallels between the development of scientific theories and Christian doctrine, Alister E. McGrath examines the growing view of early Christianity as a 'theological laboratory'. We can think of doctrinal for...
Oct 28, 2024•42 min•Ep 283•Transcript available on Metacast Recent social and political psychological research indicates that increased access to ancestry testing has strengthened the notion of genetic essentialism among some groups, or the idea that our biology ties us to particular ethnic identities. This can boost a sense of cultural pride and prosocial behaviors among communities that are perceived to be similar. In the worst-case scenarios, however, this phenomenon can contribute to deeper social woes like misinformation, anti-science agendas, and e...
Oct 27, 2024•42 min•Ep 490•Transcript available on Metacast During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to connect multiple media properties. Indeed, casting rock...
Oct 26, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 217•Transcript available on Metacast A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial V...
Oct 23, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast Does Marx have a coherent ethical vision? How does that square with his sometimes-scathing dismissal of morality? What does his critique of capital have to do with ethics? Why is the proletariat the revolutionary class? What is the normative importance of that claim? In Marx’s Ethical Vision (Oxford University Press, 2024), Vanessa Wills provides a careful reconstruction of Marx’s understanding of human nature and the possibility of creating a world best suited to our flourishing. Working from M...
Oct 21, 2024•1 hr•Ep 356•Transcript available on Metacast Democracy is struggling in an age of populism and post-truth. In a world swirling with competing political groups stating conflicting facts, citizens are left unsure whom to trust and which facts are true. The role of honesty in civic life is in jeopardy. When we lose sight of the importance of honesty, it hampers our ability to solve pressing problems. Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens (Oxford University Press, 2024) asserts that to better enable...
Oct 17, 2024•43 min•Ep 241•Transcript available on Metacast What is the connection between where people live and how they vote? In The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales (Oxford UP, 2024), Jamie Furlong a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster and Will Jennings Associate Dean Research & Enterprise and Professor at the University of Southampton, analyse the continuities and changes in history of party support at general elections. The book uses a variety of methods- and a huge range of data- to critically interrogate the idea of ‘left b...
Oct 15, 2024•50 min•Ep 488•Transcript available on Metacast Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, translators, poets, playwrights, and essayists to see how they both reacted to and in turn shaped cultural discourses, especially around learned women an...
Oct 13, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast How do families care for each when they are divided over generations by powerful geopolitical forces beyond their control? In this episode, Hanna Torsh speaks with Lynnette Arnold about her new book Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families (Oxford University Press, 2024). Lynnette also shares her tips for emerging scholars in the field about how to conduct research in changing and unstable times. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts...
Oct 06, 2024•53 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of one of contemporary India’s most contentious disputes: a long-running struggle over women’s access to the Hindu temple at Sabarimala. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the temple, which had traditionally been forbidden to women aged ten to fifty because their presence offended the presiding deity, was required to open its doors to all Hindus. The decision in Indian Younger L...
Oct 03, 2024•34 min•Ep 356•Transcript available on Metacast We commonly think of democracy as a social order governed by the people’s collective will. Given the size of the modern states, this picture is typically adjusted to say that democracy is a system of representative government, where elected officials are tasked with governing in ways that reflect the collective will of their constituents. Although it is familiar, this way of depicting democracy invites difficulties. The concept of a collective will is notoriously difficult to nail down. And, mor...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep 354•Transcript available on Metacast In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order. In contrast to this well-studied transformation, in Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2024), Samuel Hirst considers in d...
Sep 28, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 283•Transcript available on Metacast Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents of the 'movement'. This book cuts the Gordian knot. There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept. Currently 'the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines, ...
Sep 28, 2024•32 min•Ep 227•Transcript available on Metacast In their pursuit of social justice, revolutionaries have taken on the assembled might of monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. They have often, though not always, sparked cataclysmic violence, and have at times won miraculous victories, though at other times suffered devastating defeat. Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2023) illuminates the revolutionaries, their strategies, their successes and failures, and the ways in which revolutions continue to dominate world events and ...
Sep 27, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 484•Transcript available on Metacast Charmian Mansell joins Jana Byars to talk about Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2024). What was it like to be a woman in service in early modern England? Drawing on evidence recorded in church court testimony, Mansell excavates experiences of over a thousand female servants between 1532 and 1649. Intervening in histories of labour, gender, freedom, law, migration, youth, and community, Female Servants in Early Modern England rethinks traditional scholarship of s...
Sep 26, 2024•50 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers aside from the Buddha himself, concludes his masterpiece, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, with these baffling verses: For the abandonment of all views He taught the true teaching By means of compassion I salute him, Gautama But how could anyone possibly abandon all views? In Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Empt...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep 134•Transcript available on Metacast From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of the troubled accession of England's first Scottish king and the transition from the age of the Tudors to the age of the Stuarts at the dawn of the seventeenth century. From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I tells the story of the dramatic accession and first decade of the reign of James I and the transition from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean era, using a huge ra...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 1481•Transcript available on Metacast After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial crisis. China’s state-owned companies and international financial institutions have made headlines for their growing influence in the world economy. State-backed investment vehicles based in the Gulf states have made high-profile investments in global real estate markets and professional sports, while their state-owned firms have become world leaders ...
Sep 22, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast At the beginning of the twentieth century, for many English men and women of Welsh origin the idea of being in some part 'Welsh' reaffirmed their own understanding of what it meant to 'be British'. Wales in England, 1914-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wendy Ugolini is the first cultural history of this English Welsh duality - an identification with two constituent nations at once - and explores how 'Welshness' was imagined, performed, and mobilised in England during and between the ...
Sep 16, 2024•1 hr•Ep 132•Transcript available on Metacast 'Wicked Problems' are those problems facing the planet and its inhabitants, present and future, which are hard (if not impossible) to resolve and for which bold, creative, and messy solutions are typically required. The adjective 'wicked' describes the mischievous and even evil quality of these problems, where proposed solutions often turn out to be worse than the symptoms. Wicked Problems for Archaeologists: Heritage as Transformative Practice (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. John Schofie...
Sep 15, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have been denied bail. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail-especially in counties where courts are jammed with cases. City and county jails, detention centers, police lockups, and other temporary holding facilities are regularly overcrowded, poorly funded, and the buildings are often in disrepair. American j...
Sep 15, 2024•37 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships between the state and business. But these relationships have not always been smooth, as anti-corruption campaigns, financial and banking crises, and dramatic bouts of liberalization and crackdown demonstrate. Why do partnerships between ...
Sep 14, 2024•57 min•Ep 161•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Robeson's Voices (Oxford UP, 2023) is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concert, and recorded performance, and as subject of identification. Olwage asks: how does the voice encapsulate modes of subjectivity, of being? Combining ...
Sep 13, 2024•2 hr 38 min•Ep 252•Transcript available on Metacast Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal. In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie pan-shaped aircraft traveli...
Sep 11, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 1477•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey spoke with Olivier Roy, professor of social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and author of The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms (Oxford University Press, 2024). Roy argues that neoliberal globalization is dissolving not just subordinate cultures but also dominant ones by undermining the tacit understanding that undergird cultures and demanding that those ...
Sep 10, 2024•41 min•Ep 151•Transcript available on Metacast Are you a musical theatre fan who loves TikTok? Or are you curious about how this social media app has changed musical theatre fandom - and even the concept of the musical itself? TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age (Oxford UP, 2024) takes readers inside the world of TikTok Broadway, where fans create, expand, and canonize musical theatre through viral videos. It argues that TikTok democratizes musical theatre fan cultures and spaces, creating a new canon of musical theatr...
Sep 08, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 138•Transcript available on Metacast In Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those ...
Sep 05, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep 212•Transcript available on Metacast Political Scientist E.J. Fagan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, once worked at a think tank, and has long been interested in the intersecting work of think tanks and politics. Thus, The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) is an outgrowth of Fagan’s academic research and experience. Think tanks, by their very nature, are generally creating information, knowledge, policy ideas, ...
Sep 04, 2024•52 min•Ep 733•Transcript available on Metacast The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 (Oxford UP, 2020), begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history: the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese. As in the first volume of Todman's epic account of British involvement in World War II ("Total history at its best," according to Jay Winter), he highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experien...
Aug 31, 2024•55 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast 
