In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Jazz is often dubbed the greatest American original art form. This claim might be difficult to contend. But a close exploration of the folks who created, listened, and participated in jazz environments can also tell us lot about the religious history of those people. In his new book, Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015), Jason Bivins, Professor in the Departm...

The prevalence of media that reinforces a traditional masculine image of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader, is at the core of Valerie Sperling‘s analysis of gender norms and sexualization as a means of political legitimacy. Not surprisingly, the cover of her book Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford University Press 2015) , features a photograph of Putin bare-chested and...

In New Mexico, before World War Two, Catholic sisters in full habits routinely taught in public schools. In her fascinating new book, Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2012), Dr. Kathleen Holscher explores how this curious situation arose and how this partnership between public schools and female religious orders was brought...

Since its coinage in mid-19th century Germany, Realpolitik has proven both elusive and protean. To some, it represents the best approach to meaningful change and political stability in a world buffeted by uncertainty and rapid transformation. To others, it encapsulates an attitude of cynicism and cold calculation, a transparent and self-justifying policy exercised by dominant nations over weaker....

Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King are the authors of Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford UP, 2016). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Government in the Hubert H. Humphrey School and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. King is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Governme...

Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at the University of West Georgia. His book, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers the origins of the pro-life movement not as reactionary and anti-feminist, but rather as a New Deal-inspired crusade for human rights and part of a progressive Catholic social agenda. Pro-lifers...

What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ultimately matters? Pamela D. Winfield‘s recent award-winning monograph, Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of En...

In How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), David A. Lambert, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that repentance, as a concept, was read into the Bible by later interpretive communities.  He explains, for example, how ancient Israelite rituals, like fa...

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is one of the most famous Muslim thinkers in history. His autobiographical account, The Deliverer from Error, tells us of his spiritual crisis and transformative experience of journeying, which lead to his subsequent life as a pious recluse. From this experience al-Ghazali wrote his magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, filled with mystical knowledge. A...

The social sciences are about social entities – things like corporations and traffic jams, mobs and money, parents and war criminals. What is a social entity? What makes something a social entity? Traditional views hold that these things can be fully explained by facts about people – their bodies, their attitudes or some combination of these. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Soci...

Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fascinating book about another fascinating book: Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus, published in 1863. Renan’s was a nineteenth-century non-fiction bestseller, but is far from widely read today. In a series of chapters that explore issues of authorship, content,...

Christian Olaf Christiansen is an associate professor in the history of ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark. His book Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a compelling history of the idea of a gentler capitalism, or of the “soulful” self-regulating corporation, that can flourish economically while doing soc...

In his new book Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2016), cultural historian James Nott charts the untold history of dancing and dance halls in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. This exploration reveals the transformations of working-class communities, and of the changing notions of feminin...

Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people from the British Commonwealth migrated the United Kingdom with plans to settle and find work. Kennetta Hammond Perry‘s new book, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015), is a political history of postwar Caribbean migration. Perry shifts our attention...

Chances are that at this very moment, you are either looking at a computer screen, holding a digital device, or listening to my voice through plastic earphones. Our computers and these other devices are constructed out of materials that have their origins in lands across the globe. And oil plays a central and early role in the causal story of how we came into possession of them. Oil also plays a l...

El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have found the press coverage of El Sistema suspiciously rosy, however, will find quite another account in Geoffrey Baker‘s engrossing and at times sharply critical book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s ...

Mark R. Stoll is associate professor of history and Director of Environmental Studies at Texas Tech University. His book Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a history of environmentalism emerging from a religious aesthetics and moral vision. Stoll argues that environmentalism began with Calvinists theological commitme...

Published in October 2015, Caroline Shaw‘s timely new book, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford University Press, 2015), traces the intertwined development of the category of refugee and of the moral commitment of Britons to providing refuge for persecuted foreigners. By confidently working across a range of methods and geopolitical contex...

We don’t commonly think of procreation as a moral issue. But why not? When you think about it, creating another person seems like a morally weighty thing to do. And we tend to think that procreation under certain conditions would be irresponsible, selfish, or reckless. Might there also be cases where procreation is morally impermissible? In The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation Ma...

Adam Sheingate has written Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Sheingate is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. Who is spending all this money – multiple billions in 2016 – on politics? Consultants, of course, and they’ve been at it for decades. In Building...

In his new book Rigging The Game: How Inequality is Reproduced in Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2014), Michael Schwalbe identifies the roots of inequality in the appearance of economic surplus as human societies transitioned from communal hunting and gathering societies to forms of sedentary agricultural production that enabled a few to live off the surplus produced by the many. This imm...

What stories do we tell about finance? How does financial print culture shape our lives? Our guest today explores the narratives we have been told, and tell, about finance. A literary scholar, Leigh Claire La Berge writes about the representations of finance in years after 1979 and how many of the stories we tell about finance–that it is abstract and exceedingly complicated–took hold in this era....

George Cotkin is an emeritus professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. In his book Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, 2015) he has given us cultural criticism through a set of provocative portraits of creative Americans at mid-twentieth century who defied convention, pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and forged a new sensib...

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, NYU) grapples with these questions. The book is a pragmatic philosophical exploration of climate change and the human response to it at the same time that i...

Exorcisms and demons. In his new book American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sean McCloud argues that not only have such phenomena been on the rise in the last 30 or so years, they also reveal prominent tropes within the contemporary American religious landscape. More precisely, readers are introduced to the first in-depth study of...