Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

It’s true that Western “intellectuals” have not always been wrong about dictators fighting for a supposedly “brighter future,” usually (though not always) of the non-capitalist variety. Nonetheless, as Paul Hollander well shows in his readable, relevant book From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship (Cambridge University Press, 2016), they have bee...

In the age of the railroad, social movements, revivals, and campaigns for political office spread like wildfire across the United States. Leaders and their surrogates could go travel faster than ever before, even as industrial capitalism overthrew the public and private relationships of a previous era. As would-be movement leaders discovered their growing power to reach a national audience, their...

In the preface to his new book, Timothy Cheek calls out a widespread tendency to focus on dissidents when engaging with Chinese intellectuals. (This is a problem insofar as we use these intellectuals as a mirror for our own concerns, hopes, and fears.) Instead, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History...

Burmese Buddhist monks have featured in the news quite a lot in recent times, not as peaceful practitioners of self-abnegation, but at activists at the forefront of political movements characterized as comprising of a new kind of religious nationalism. For anyone confused by this phenomenon, and wondering how the religious thought of Buddhist monks and laypeople in Myanmar informs and motivates po...

Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century earlier. In the new book, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Grace Davie shows that the poverty question was up for grabs even into the twenty-first century because of ong...

In his farewell address, President George Washington warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of what has come to be known in American political speech as “foreign entanglements.” Whether Washington’s successors heeded this advice is an open question; the U.S.–at least since World War I–has often been and remains today “entangled” in various ways. But, as Mark P. Bradley points out in his new boo...

What did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the nature and significance of French auditory culture in the years between the two world wars? These are two of the central questions that Rebecca Scales pursues in her new book, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939 (Cambridge Univer...

Lizabeth Cohen‘s Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 was originally published in 1990, and recently re-published in 2014. In this book, Cohen explores how it was that Chicago workers, who could not overcome ethnic and racial divisions during a wave of failed strikes in 1919, came together in the mid to late-1930s across ethnic and racial lines “to make a New Deal” for thems...

In her new book, Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Anna Harwell Celenza examines the arrival of jazz in Italy after World War I and the role of Mussolini in promoting jazz throughout Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. With the technology of the radio and gramophone, jazz became part of the local music culture and ethnic...

In my time doing this podcast, I’ve covered a number of books about transitional justice. All have been insightful and interesting. But few of them focused carefully on the trials themselves. Anuradha Chakravarty seeks to remedy this. Her book Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2016) looks carefully a...

In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek, Romans, and early Christians critiqued these practices. As the kosher laws are first encountered in the Hebrew Bible, this study is rooted in ancient bi...

Developmental psychology seems to tell us how to best to raise our children into competent and decent adults. However, comparing our theories and practices to those of other cultures raises questions about whether our ideas are ethnocentric. This topic is at the center of anthropologist David F. Lancy’s latest book, The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings, 2nd edition (Cambrid...

In his recent monograph, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Benjamin Schonthal examines the relationship between constitutional law and religious conflict in Sri Lanka during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Situating his study alongside broader conversations in the field of constitutional law and specif...

Does patronage always imply a corruption of democratic political processes? Across sixteen essays by historians, political scientists and anthropologists Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2014), edited by Anastasia Piliavsky, explores this question and many more across a range of historical and cultural contexts. The volume’s collective drive to ask difficult and the...

Are complex phenomena “nothing but the sum of their parts”, or are they “more than the sum of their parts”? Physicists, chemists, and biologists as well as philosophers have long argued on both sides of this debate between the idea of reduction and that of emergence. At this point, argues Carl Gillett, the sides have reached a stalemate, where it is difficult to know in what ways the sides fundame...

With public debate about immigration law and policy at a peak, Anna Law is on the podcast this week to discuss her book The Immigration Battle in American Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2014) which came out in paperback in 2014. Law is the Associate Professor and Herb Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights Political Science at Brooklyn College, CUNY. In the book, Law assesses the role of the fed...

This week on the podcast, I speak with Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, the co-authors (along with Pei-te Lien and Christine Marie Sierra) of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hardy-Fanta is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Mas...

“There were black Germans?” My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and sometimes earlier), and that this community has at times had an influence on German culture, society, and racial thinking that belied its small size. Germany’s role in colonizing Africa has received increased...

You find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea monsters, and sundry multi-headed predators. But you also find a lot of bizarre, well, people. These include giant people, tiny people, one-footed people, people with two heads, and people with no heads at all (their eyes, mouths and noses are in...

When and where do African American religions begin? Sylvester Johnson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Religious Studies at Northwestern University, disrupts the traditional temporal and geographical boundaries in the academic study of black religion in the Americas in his new book, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University...

In her brilliant new book Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Lena Salaymeh, Associate Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University, presents a fascinating account of the historical unfolding of Islamic Law that combines dazzling textual analysis with cutting-edge theoretical interventions. Beginnings of Islamic Law makes a formidable...

What new can there be to say about the New Deal? Perhaps more than you think. Join us as Karen Tani talks about her new book, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights and American Governance, 1935-1972 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which examines the ways in which the rights talk we typically associate with the 1960s might be traced back to New Deal Administrators who, through programs like the...

Christian Lange’s Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which was recently awarded the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society’s Book Prize, presents a rich, challenging, and meticulous account of how Muslims have conceptualized the spiritual world across the centuries. (Lange also edited a related volume with Brill, 2016, Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions.) With...

Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the U.S. welfare state is configured to obscure its real beneficiaries. We’ll also talk with Prof. Faricy about what a Trump Presidency and unified Republican...

On the eve of the 2016 election, it is worth reflecting on the history of women’s voting. Up to this weighty task is a new book by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht. They are the authors of Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Corder is professor of political science at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and Wolb...