In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
1,410 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★★ - 1 ratingInterviews with Oxford University Press authors about their books
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Episodes
Crawford Gribben, "J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 24, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesJ.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) describes the work of one of the most important and under-studied theologians in the history of Christianity. In the late 1820s, John Nelson Darby abandoned his career as a priest in the Church of Ireland to become one of the principal leaders of a small but rapidly growing religious movement that became known as the "Plymouth Brethren." Darby and other brethren modified the Calvinism that was common among their eva...
Anu Bradford, "Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 24, 2024 08:00 - 19 minutesThe global battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape th...
Miriam Piilonen, "Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhat did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human (Oxford UP, 2024) is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music i...
Seamus O'Malley, "Irish Culture and 'The People': Populism and Its Discontents" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 11, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesSeamus O’Malley is an associate professor at Yeshiva University. His first book was Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2015). He has co-edited three volumes, one of essays on Ford Madox Ford and America (Rodopi, 2010), a research companion to Ford (Routledge, 2018) and a volume of essays on the cartoonists Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (Mississippi, 2018). He is the chair of the Ford Madox Ford Society and co-chair of the Columbia University Sem...
Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe concept of the puruṣa, or person, is implicated in a wide range of ancient texts throughout the Indian subcontinent. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, Matthew I. Robertson traces the development of this concept from 1500 BCE to 400 CE: in the Ṛg Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, the Upaniṣads, Buddhist Pāli suttas, the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitā, and the Mahābhārata. Pushing back against the interpretation of personhood as a cosmological microcosm, R...
Xiaofei Kang, "Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourChina’s communist revolution has an intricate relationship with gender and religion. In Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023), Xiaofei Kang moves the two themes to the center stage in the Chinese Revolution. It examines the Communist Party’s first anti-superstition campaign in its wartime headquarters of Yan’an, the holy land of the Maoist revolution. The book argues that religion was not a mere adversary for th...
Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesIn recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-aut...
Louis Howard Porter, "Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesBefore Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international organisations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it refused to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other major agencies beyond the Security Council and General Assembly, casting them as foreign meddlers. Under new leadership, the USSR joined UNESCO and a slew of international organisations for the first time, ...
Richard Beaudoin, "Sounds As They Are: The unwritten music in classical recordings" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn a recording, what sounds count as music? Sounds made by a musician's body--including inhales, finger taps, and grunts--have for decades been dismissed as extraneous noises. In Sounds As They Are: The unwritten music in classical recordings (Oxford UP, 2024), author Richard Beaudoin pioneers a field of inquiry into non-notated sounds in recordings of classical music, recognizing often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music. Beaudoin classif...
Rina Verma Williams, "Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesHow has the participation of women in Hindu nationalist politics in India changed over time? More broadly, what has their changing participation meant for women, Hindu nationalism, and Indian democracy? In Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Rina Verma Williams places women's participation in religious politics in India into historical and comparative perspective through a focus on the most important Hindu nationalist ...
Katie Barclay, "Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 17 minutesCaritas, a form of grace that turned our love for our neighbour into a spiritual practice, was expected of all early modern Christians, and corresponded with a set of ethical rules for living that displayed one's love in the everyday. Caritas was not just a willingness to behave morally, to keep the peace, and to uphold social order however, but was expected to be felt as a strong passion, like that of a parent to a child. Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford UP, 2021)...
Huaping Lu-Adler, "Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesKant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere (Oxford UP, 2023), philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic ...
Citizenship Across Time and Space with David Jacobson
March 28, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey discusses the past and future of citizenship with David Jacobson, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida (Tampa). They discuss the origins of the concept of citizenship in the ancient Near East a few thousand years ago and how kinship notions shape the debate on citizenship even in our own time. In their recent book Citizenship: The Third Revolution (Oxford UP, 2023), Jacobson and his co-author, Manlio Cina...
Robin Waterfield, "Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 28, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesThe first ever biography of the founder of Western philosophy Considered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. In his teens, he honed his intellect by attending lectures from the many thinkers who passed through Athens and toyed with the idea of writing poetry. He finally decided to go into politics, but became disillusioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his teacher, Socrate...
Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution
March 27, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesContemporary politics is characterized by the rise (and fall) of many new parties. But what tools do political scientists have to map and measure electoral volatility? How can we best capture this change? And what insights can political scientists draw from other disciplines? Join host Tim Haughton for a discussion with Allan Sikk and Philipp Köker, the authors of a new book, Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2023). Their book draws on a database of 200 00...
William Bain, "Political Theology of International Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIs contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain's Political Theology of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2020) challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval t...
Colleen Taylor, "Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCoins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, pigs. Each of these objects were ubiquitous in the premodern cultural representation of the Irish. Through case studies of these five objects, Colleen Taylor’s new monograph Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2024) recovers the sometimes-oppressive, sometimes-liberatory meanings invested in nonhuman matter. Irish Materialisms collects a rich archive of material from William Carleton’s “Phi...
Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 34 minutesGlobal adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian states are digitally catching up with their democratic counterparts, and both are showing a growing interest in the use of cyber controls--online censorship and surveillance technologies--that allow governments to exercise control over the Internet. Under what conditions does a digitally connected society actually help states target their enemies?...
Aaron Clift, "Anticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAnticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023) evaluates the prevalence of anticommunism among the French population in 1945 to 1953, and examines its causes, character, and consequences through a series of case studies on different segments of French society. These include the scouting movement; family organisations; agricultural associations; middle-class groups; and trade unions and other working-class organisations. Aaron Clift contends that anticommunism was mo...
Cristina Rocha, "Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhen did Christianity become cool? How did an Australian church conquer the world and expand into Brazil, a country with its own crop of powerful megachurches? In her exciting new book, Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities (Oxford UP, 2023), anthropologist Cristina Rocha analyses the creation of a transnational Pentecostal field between Brazil and Australia, two countries that have been peripheral in the history of Pentecostalism but which more recently h...
Patryk I. Labuda, "International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesIn the 1990s, the promise of justice for atrocity crimes was associated with the revival of international criminal tribunals (ICTs). More recently, however, there has been a renewed emphasis on domestic accountability for international crimes across the globe. In identifying a 'complementarity turn', a paradigm shift toward domestic accountability in the field of international criminal justice, this book investigates how the shadow of international criminal tribunals influences the treatment ...
Radha Kapuria, "Music in Colonial Punjab" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourMusic in Colonial Punjab (Oxford UP, 2023) offers the first social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800-1947), beginning at the Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and concluding at the Patiala royal darbar. It unearths new evidence for the centrality of female performers and classical music in a region primarily viewed as a folk music centre, featuring a range of musicians and dancers -from 'mirasis' (bards) and 'kalawants' (elite musicians), to 'kanjris' (subaltern female performers...
Eileen Kane et al., "Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 20, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThe roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. To explore those entanglements, Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford UP, 2023) presents and contextualizes a set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and/or Tatar: a 1772 Russian naval officer’s diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, an interview with a Russian-educated contemporary Syrian novelist, and many more. Thes...
Rachel Gordan, "Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. By the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly-forgotten bestsellers, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American ...
Thomas D. Conlan, "Kings in All But Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesIn the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretching to Korea and China, as well as the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, which functioned as an important regional port with a growing population and a host of temples and shrines. The family was unique in claiming ethnic descent from Korean kings, and-remarkably for this time-such claims were recognized in both Korea and Japan. Their position, coupl...
Janine Giordano Drake, "The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesIn 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. "Socialism," he wrote, "has become a distinct substitute" for the church. He was not wrong. In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. The...
Authoritarian Practices Go Well Beyond Authoritarian Regimes
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 26 minutesAuthoritarianism is not something that happens only within the borders of authoritarian regimes. In this episode, Marlies Glasius talks with host Licia Cianetti about her work on “authoritarian practices”, how the sabotage of accountability can take place also within democracies, how it can be transnational, how the actors involved are not always the ones you are thinking about, and what this all means for the future of democracy. Marlies Glasius is Professor of International Relations at the...
Sofia Rehman, "Gendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesGendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers (Oxford UP, 2024) presents for the first time a partial translation and study of Imam Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi's work, al-Ijaba li-Iradi ma Istadraktahu Aisha Ala al-Sahabah-"The Corrective: Aisha's Rectification of the Companions. "It critically analyses from the perspective of hadith criticism a number of sections presenting Aisha's refutations and corrections of key Companions including, Umar b. al-K...
David Savran, "Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 11, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesTell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even transforming local practices and traditions. It traces especially how the musical has been indigenized in South Korea and Germany, the commercial centers for Broadway musicals in East Asia and continental Europe. Both countries were occupied after World War II by the United States, which disseminated U.S. American popular music, jazz, movies, an...
Jon Robson, "Aesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA lot of what we claim to know we learn from other people's testimony: they tell us, and in many ordinary contexts that is enough to gain knowledge. But for many philosophers, aesthetics is different. Such pessimists about aesthetic testimony hold that facts about aesthetic properties – such as Shakespeare's Hamlet being a tragedy, or Picasso's Guernica being anti-war – can't be transmitted by testimony, and can only be learned through first-person experience. In Aesthetic Testimony: An Opti...
Myrto Garani et al., "The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 09, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesSeveral decades of scholarship have demonstrated that Roman thinkers developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer many perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy explores a range of such Roman philosophical perspectives through thirty-four newly commissioned essays. Where Roman philosophy has long been considered a mere extension of Hellen...
Carmen Fracchia, "'Black But Human': Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700" (Oxford UP, 2019)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourCarmen Fracchia's book Black But Human': Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700 (Oxford UP, 2019) is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and libe...
Edda Fields-Black, "Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourMost Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and...
Priyasha Saksena, "Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia (Oxford UP, 2023), Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-old question of what constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere. She explores the history of sovereignty through an analysis of the jurisdictional politics involving the princely states of colonial South Asia. Governed by local rulers, these princely states were subject to British paramountcy whilst remaining legally distinct ...
Razak Khan, "Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourRazak Khan's Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the diversity of the histories and identities of Muslims in Rampur-the last Muslim-ruled princely state in colonial United Provinces and a city that is pejoratively labelled as the center of "Muslim vote bank" politics in contemporary Uttar Pradesh. The book highlights the importance of locality and emotions in shaping Muslim identities, politics, and belonging in Rampur. The book show...
Charlotte Witt, "Social Goodness: The Ontology of Social Norms" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 05, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn our day-to-day lives, we are subject to normative requirements, obligations, and expectations that originate in the social roles we occupy. For example, professors ought to pursue the truth, while parents ought to be supportive of their children. What’s interesting is that these role-specific requirements seem to befall us. We do not choose them. This raises the puzzle of what accounts for their normativity. In Social Goodness: The Ontology of Social Norms (Oxford University Press 2023), C...
Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, "The Jewish Annotated New Testament" (Oxford UP, 2017)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFirst published in 2011, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford UP, 2017) was a groundbreaking work, bringing the New Testament's Jewish background to the attention of students, clergy, and general readers. In this new edition, eighty Jewish scholars bring together unparalleled scholarship to shed new light on the text. This thoroughly revised and greatly expanded second edition brings even more helpful information and new insights to the study of the New Testament. For Christian readers ...
Jean-Manuel Roubineau, "The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 30 minutesThe ancient philosopher Diogenes--nicknamed "The Dog" and decried by Plato as a "Socrates gone mad"--was widely praised and idealized as much as he was mocked and vilified. A favorite subject of sculptors and painters since the Renaissance, his notoriety is equally due to his infamously eccentric behavior, scorn of conventions, and biting aphorisms, and to the role he played in the creation of the Cynic school, which flourished from the 4th century B.C. to the Christian era. In The Dangerous ...
Derron Wallace, "The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesHow does race matter in schools? In The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth (Oxford UP, 2023), Derron Wallace, the Jacob S. Potofsky Chair in Sociology at Brandeis University, tells the contrasting stories of two schools in the UK and USA. The book demonstrates two very different sets of expectations for Black youth in the two countries schools, and two very different educational and social structures reinforcing these expectations. The book draws on a rich...
Calla Hummel, "Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 25, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesInformal workers make up over two billion workers or about 50 percent of the global workforce, and yet scholarly understandings of informal workers’ political and civil society participation remain limited. In Why Informal Workers Organize? Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Calla Hummel finds that informal workers organize in nearly every country for which data exists, but to varying degrees. Why do informal workers organize in some places more ...
Michael Johnston, "The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 24, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesMichael Johnston's The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500 (Oxford UP, 2023) addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Who copied and disseminated these diverse manuscripts? Who read the literary texts that they transmit? And what was the relationship between those copying literature and those reading it? To answer these questions, this...
Michael Kimmage, "Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability" (Oxford UP, 2024)
February 23, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesOne war, three collisions: Russia with Ukraine, Europe, and the US. On the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion, Michael Kimmage analyses the disparate factors that led to war in Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (OUP Press, 2024). "After a few anomalous years of peace, Europe became in 2022 what it has always been, an epicentre of conflict, the fault line around which the biggest and worst geopolitical earthquakes tend to occur". A member o...
Knut A. Jacobsen, "The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diasporas" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesKnut A. Jacobsen's edited volume The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora (Oxford UP, 2023) presents the histories and religious traditions of Hindus with a South Asian ancestral background living outside of South Asia. Hinduism is a global religion with a significant presence in many countries throughout the world. The most important cause of this global expansion is migration. This book presents and analyses the most important of the geographies, migration histories, religious traditi...
Marko Attila Hoare, "Serbia: A Modern History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutes“Serbia is a country that has inspired exceptional intellectual interest,” writes Marko Marko Attila Hoare in Serbia: A Modern History (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2024). “It was centrally involved in the crises marking both the start and end of Europe’s 20th century: the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the Wars of Yugoslav Succession beginning in 1991. Yet this interest has not translated into a large English-language historiography of the country”. This exhaustive political history of Serbia from ...
Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, "Tudor Networks of Power" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 21, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesTudor Networks of Power (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Ruth Ahnert & Dr. Sebastian Ahnert is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist specialising in complex networks. Together they have reconstructed and computationally analysed the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history (1509-1603), based on the British State Papers. The 130,000 letters that survive in the State Papers...
T. Corey Brennan, "The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome's Most Dangerous Political Symbol" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 21, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutes"Fascism" is a word ubiquitous in our contemporary political discourse, but few know about its roots in the ancient past or its long, strange evolution to the present. In ancient Rome, the fasces were a bundle of wooden rods bound with a leather cord, in which an axe was placed—in essence, a mobile kit for corporal or capital punishment. Attendants typically carried fasces before Rome's higher officials, to induce feelings of respect and fear for the relevant authority. This highly performati...
Rebecca Roache, "For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourSwearing can be a powerful communicative act, for good or ill. The same word can incite violence or increase intimacy. How is swearing so multivalent in its power? Is it just all those harsh “c” and “k” sounds? Does swearing take its power from taboo meaning? Why is swearing sometimes so funny? In For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun (Oxford University Press, 2023), Rebecca Roache, host of the podcast The Academic Imperfectionist, offers us rich insights into the complex i...
How to Teach TESOL Ethically in an English-Dominant World
February 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourCarla Chamberlin and Mak Khan speak with Ingrid Piller about linguistic diversity and social justice. We discuss whether US native speakers of English can teach English ethically; how migrant parents can foster their children’s biliteracy; what the language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic are; whether multilingualism researchers have a monolingual English-centric blind spot; and how the research paradigms of World Englishes and multilingualism connect. First published on November 19, 2020...
Tom Hamilton, "A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France" (Oxford UP, 2024)
February 19, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesParis, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as 'things that had never been'? A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of...
Vytautas Jankauskas and Steffen Eckhard, "The Politics of Evaluation in International Organizations" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 19, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesEvaluation has become a key tool in assessing the performance of international organisations, in fostering learning, and in demonstrating accountability. Within the United Nations (UN) system, thousands of evaluators and consultants produce hundreds of evaluation reports worth millions of dollars every year. But does evaluation really deliver on its promise of objective evidence and functional use? By unravelling the internal machinery of evaluation systems in international organisations, The...