Even after seventy-five years, the UN Security Council meets nearly every day. They respond to a range of threats to international peace and security, but not all threats. Why does the Security Council take up some issues for discussion and not others? What factors shape the Council's actions, if they take any action at all?  Adapting insights from legislative bargaining, Bargaining in the UN Security Council: Setting the Global Agenda (Oxford UP, 2022) demonstrates that the agenda-setting powers granted in the institutional rules offer less powerful Council members the opportunity to influence the content of a resolution without jeopardizing its passage. The Council also decides when to conduct public or private diplomacy. The analysis shows how external factors like international and domestic public reactions motivate grandstanding behaviors and shape resolutions. New quantitative data on meetings and outside options provide support for these claims. The book also explores the dynamics of the formal analysis in three cases: North Korean nuclear proliferation, the negotiations leading up to NATO bombing in Serbia over Kosovo, and the elected member-led process to codify the principles of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. The book argues that while the powerful veto members do have great influence over the Council, the rules of the most consequential security institution influence its policy outcomes, just as they do in any other international institution. Susan Allen is an associate (soon to be full!) professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. She received her Ph.D. from Emory University and bachelor's degree from Guilford College. In addition to Bargaining in the UN Security Council, she has published articles on economic and military intervention in International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Research Quarterly, Conflict Management and Peace Science among others. In her spare time, she’s an associate editor at Foreign Policy Analysis. You can also find her on Twitter @lady_professor. Amy Yuen is a professor of political science and department chair at Middlebury College in Vermont. Alongside her work on the UN Security Council, she has published articles on third-party intervention, peacekeeping, peace duration, and research methods in International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Analysis, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Peace Research among others. She is also an associate editor for Conflict Management and Peace Science. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

Philosophy of action in the context of Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative. Classical Chinese philosophers began from the assumption that relations are primary to the constitution of the person, hence acting in the early Chinese context necessarily is interacting and co-acting along with others -human and nonhuman actors.  Mercedes Valmisa's Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action (Oxford UP, 2021) is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers in order to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency -what the author has denominated "adapting" or "adaptive agency" (yin). As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action also conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires great capacity of self and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response, which allows the agent to co-raise courses of action ad-hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world's oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to deal with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines, opening a brand-new topic in Chinese and comparative philosophy. You can find her very teachable essay "We are interwoven beings" on Aeon here.

Cynicism is usually seen as a provocative mode of dissent from conventional moral thought, casting doubt on the motives that guide right conduct. When critics today complain that it is ubiquitous but lacks the serious bite of classical Cynicism, they express concern that it can now only be corrosively negative. The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time (Oxford UP, 2020) takes a more balanced view. Re-evaluating the role of cynicism in literature, cultural criticism, and philosophy from 1840 to the present, it treats cynic confrontationalism as a widely-employed credibility-check on the promotion of moral ideals--with roots in human psychology. Helen Small investigates how writers have engaged with Cynic traditions of thought, and later more gestural styles of cynicism, to re-calibrate dominant moral values, judgements of taste, and political agreements. The argument develops through a series of cynic challenges to accepted moral thinking: Friedrich Nietzsche on morality; Thomas Carlyle v. J. S. Mill on the permissible limits of moral provocation; Arnold on the freedom of criticism; George Eliot and Ford Madox Ford on cosmopolitanism; Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Laura Kipnis on the conditions of work in the university. The Function of Cynicism treats topics of present-day public concern: abrasive styles of public argument; debasing challenges to conventional morality; free speech, moral controversialism; the authority of reason and the limits of that authority; nationalism and resistance to nationalism; and liberty of expression as a core principle of the university. Helen Small is Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Value of the Humanities (OUP, 2013) and The Long Life (OUP, 2007) (winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism (2008) and the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (2008)), and editor of The Public Intellectual (Blackwell, 2002). She has written widely on literature and philosophy, nineteenth-century fiction and public moralism, and the relationship between the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line.  Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family (Oxford UP, 2021) overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century. Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience.

Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2023) is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation of readers. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework. While recognizing the distinctive personalities and ideas of these two men, this study more broadly conveys the competing roles and impact of the professional military, the Congress, and a mobilized peace movement. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important re-interpretation of the Nixon Administration's relations with the Soviet Union and China vis a vis the war in Southeast Asia. She argues that in their desperate effort to overcome, or at least overshadow, their failure in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger made major concessions to both nations in the field of arms control, their response to the India-Pakistan war, and the diplomacy surrounding Taiwan--much of this secret. Despite policymakers' claims that the Vietnam War was a "national security" necessity that would demonstrate American strength to the communist superpowers and "credibility" to friendly governments, the historical record suggests a different reality. A half-century after the Paris Peace Conference marking the withdrawal of US troops and advisors from Vietnam and foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, Fire and Rain is a dramatic account of geopolitical decision making, civil society, and the human toll of the war on the people of Southeast Asia. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

The remarkable progress in algorithms for machine and deep learning have opened the doors to new opportunities, and some dark possibilities. However, a bright future awaits those who build on their working methods by including HCAI strategies of design and testing. As many technology companies and thought leaders have argued, the goal is not to replace people, but to empower them by making design choices that give humans control over technology. In Human-Centered AI (Oxford UP, 2022), Professor Ben Shneiderman offers an optimistic realist's guide to how artificial intelligence can be used to augment and enhance humans' lives. This project bridges the gap between ethical considerations and practical realities to offer a road map for successful, reliable systems. Digital cameras, communications services, and navigation apps are just the beginning. Shneiderman shows how future applications will support health and wellness, improve education, accelerate business, and connect people in reliable, safe, and trustworthy ways that respect human values, rights, justice, and dignity. Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford UP, 2022) interrogates how people with an interest in African slavery manufactured and publicly disseminated a baseless rhetoric about climate, race, and labor that they knew, privately, to contradict their lived experiences. In the late eighteenth century, plantation owners and slaveholders in the Caribbean and the American South publicly argued that physiological and biological differences made African people more capable of withstanding the heat and labor required to work on plantations. This climatic defense of slavery allowed planters to deny their own culpability in enslaving human beings while also framing the issue of racial slavery. The Nature of Slavery challenges this framing of labor, environment, and the development of racial ideologies. Using extensive personal and professional correspondence and colonial records, Dr. Katherine Johnston demonstrates that privately planters did not observe any health differences between Black and white bodies. White slaveholders publicly defended racial slavery constructed on a climatic rhetoric and biological theory of race they knew to be false. The ideology linking race and climate supported the economic motives of these enslavers and this defense of racial slavery in the late 18th century became a retroactive explanation for its establishment in the colonies. This climatic dichotomy to justify slavery and their economic livelihood contributed to historical myths about enslaved bodies and a groundless theory of race which was used to perpetuate the institution of slavery. Nature of Slavery powerfully argues that a “rhetoric of bodily difference gained strength and power as slaveholders and others imbued it with a language of nature.” Dr. Katherine Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History & Philosophy at Montana State University. Her work focuses on slavery, race, the body, and the environment in Atlantic plantation societies. Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

The Internet plays a central role in how we communicate, share information, disseminate ideas, maintain social connections, and conduct business. The Internet also exacerbates existing problems regarding irrationality, bias, wrongful discrimination, exploitation, and dehumanization. Moreover, the Internet gives rise to new ethical and epistemological problems – fake news, sock-puppetry, internet hoaxes, disinformation, and so on. In Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet (Oxford University Press 2023), Karen Frost-Arnold proposes a multi-layered social epistemology designed to assist us in navigating the fraught normative landscape of the online world. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

Jews and Christians alike have made Psalm 91 one of the most commonly used and cited parts of the Bible. For over two thousand years, the psalm has played a pivotal role in discussions of theology and politics, of medicine and mysticism. In He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91 (Oxford UP, 2022), acclaimed religion scholar Philip Jenkins illustrates how the evolving uses of Psalm 91 map developing ideas about religion and the supernatural. Depending on the era, Psalm 91 is protective; it is triumphalist; it is messianic; it is millenarian and apocalyptic; it is therapeutic. It has shaped theories of politics and government. In different ages, it has borne many different names: the Song of Evil Spirits, the Soldier's Psalm, and most broadly, the Protection Psalm. As the Song of Plagues, it has gained a whole new relevance in an age of global pandemic. In the New Testament, Satan himself quotes the psalm, and ever since, that text has both reflected and shaped changing concepts of evil and the demonic. It can be read as a lesson in exalted monotheistic theology, but it was and is used for magical purposes, including for exorcism and demon-fighting. As threats have evolved in various societies, so interpretations of Psalm 91 have developed to accommodate each new reality. The psalm's language about demons and evil forces has repeatedly come into play when Christianity encounters other religious traditions. At every stage, interpretations have to be understood in the larger context of social, spiritual, and practical concerns--indeed, a biography of Psalm 91 is also a history of critical themes in Western religion. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

Americans have always had mixed emotions about schooling: in popular literature and television, teachers are often depicted as tyrannical authorities, even as in classroom settings they often try to style themselves as "friends." Dr. Rita Koganzon, professor of political science at the University of Houston, discusses the history of the idea of authority in education, dwelling on Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, and Bodin. Along the way, she covers contemporary issues like homeschooling and parents' rights, and how attitudes towards those concepts have changed from the Early Modern period to the present.  Koganzon is the author of Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought (Oxford UP,  2021). Also see her recent article "There Is No Such Thing as a Banned Book: Censorship, Authority, and the School Book Controversies of the 1970s." Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

During the Second World War, the United States built over two hundred defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperation in hemisphere defense. Predictably, it proved to be a fraught affair. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, defense construction incited local conflicts that belied the wartime rhetoric of fraternity and equality.  Rebecca Herman's book Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America (Oxford UP, 2022) reconstructs the history of US basing in World War II Latin America, from the elegant chambers of the American foreign ministries to the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels surrounding US defense sites. Foregrounding the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book considers how Latin American leaders and diplomats used basing rights as bargaining chips to advance their nation-building agendas with US resources, while limiting overreach by the "Colossus of the North" as best they could. Yet conflicts on the ground over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction routinely threatened the peace. Steeped in conflict, the story of wartime basing certainly departs from the celebratory triumphalism commonly associated with this period in US-Latin American relations, but this book does not wholly upend the conventional account of wartime cooperation. Rather, the history of basing distills a central tension that has infused regional affairs since a wave of independence movements first transformed the Americas into a society of nations: national sovereignty and international cooperation may seem like harmonious concepts in principle, but they are difficult to reconcile in practice. Drawing on archival research in five countries, Cooperating with the Colossus is a revealing history told at the local, national, and international levels of how World War II transformed power and politics in the Americas in enduring ways. Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, childhood and youth studies, and social inequality. She is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University.

Vaccine reluctance and refusal are no longer limited to the margins of society. Debates around vaccines' necessity -- along with questions around their side effects -- have gone mainstream, blending with geopolitical conflicts, political campaigns, celebrity causes, and "natural" lifestyles to win a growing number of hearts and minds. Today's anti-vaccine positions find audiences where they've never existed previously. Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away (Oxford UP, 2020) examines how the issues surrounding vaccine hesitancy are, more than anything, about people feeling left out of the conversation. A new dialogue is long overdue, one that addresses the many types of vaccine hesitancy and the social factors that perpetuate them. To do this, Stuck provides a clear-eyed examination of the social vectors that transmit vaccine rumors, their manifestations around the globe, and how these individual threads are all connected. Heidi J. Larson, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science and is the Founding Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is also Clinical Professor of Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and Guest Professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is the most commonly diagnosed birth abnormality in the US. With great advances in surgery and medicine, however, survival rates have improved by 75% since the 1940s. Welcome news, of course, as only a few decades ago these birth defects were considered a death sentence, but as with any chronic condition, survival does not mean the issue is cured. With better medical care, babies born today with CHD have a good chance of surviving, but throughout their entire lives they can face surgeries, invasive treatments, lifelong monitoring, frequent medical check-ups, and significant limitations on physical activity, in addition to poor public awareness which can have an impact on social inclusion and understanding. Much attention has rightly been focused on the medical needs of these children and on providing their parents and caretakers with resources and information to navigate the complexities of this chronic condition. Little attention, however, has been paid to the psychosocial impacts on these individuals, especially as they grow, mature, and become adults living with a serious, chronic medical condition. Prevalence rates for anxiety, depression, and PTSD are significantly higher (2-3x in some cases) for people living with CHD than the general adult population. From feeling self-conscious about scars and limitations on physical activity and sense of loss around so many of life's little normalcies, to frequent hospital visits and living in constant fear of an emergency, this condition is ever-present. Liza Morton and Tracy Livecchi are both mental health professionals who have developed a specialty in working with clients who have chronic medical conditions, and they are both themselves living with CHD.  In Healing Hearts and Minds: A Holistic Approach to Coping Well with Congenital Heart Disease (Oxford UP, 2023) they set out to provide the resources and support they have been looking for their entire adult lives. While their powerful personal stories are woven into the narrative, the book is focused on providing evidence-based coping and self-care skills for adults living with CHD.

Appropriating insights from empirical findings and theoretical constructs of 'embodied cognition', Corporeal Theology: The Nature of Theological Understanding in Light of Embodied Cognition (Oxford UP, 2023) explores how theological understanding is accommodated to the bodily nature of human cognition. The principle of divine accommodation provides a theological framework for considering the human cognitive capacities that are accommodated by theological concepts and ecclesial practices. A rich portrait of the nature of human cognitive capacities is drawn from an emerging paradigm in cognitive science, embodied cognition, which proposes that cognition depends upon bodily sensorimotor systems to ground concepts and to draw upon environmental resources. Embodied cognition's hypothesis that human concepts are grounded in sensorimotor states poses a theological quandary for God-concepts, since identifying God with sensorimotor content risks idolatry. The incarnation resolves this problem in theological epistemology by grounding God-concepts in bodily understanding, while avoiding idolatry. Thus, the incarnation represents an accommodation to human conceptual capacities. Embodied cognition further hypothesises that cognition relies on sensorimotor engagement with the world rather than internal mental representations. Subsequently, in addition to the brain, bodily states and environmental artefacts 'scaffold' cognitive processes. A scaffolded view of cognition highlights the cognitive import of embodied religious practices, which choregraph the body and curate material culture. Tanton applies dozens of studies identifying mechanisms by which bodily or environmental factors influence cognition to the embodied and material dimensions Christian practices. On account of their inherent cognitive effects, practices are theorised to have intrinsic 'embodied' meanings alongside 'symbolic' ones established by conventions. Consequently, liturgy is seen as a bearer of theological content rather than merely an expression of it; a locus of religious experience; and a crucial determinate of religious and ethical formation. Again, the embodied nature of Christian liturgy is understood in terms of accommodation. Embodied cognition research helpfully illuminates the details of human embodiment to which theological understanding must be accommodated. Frazer MacDiarmid holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford, and currently works on Māori-Crown relations in New Zealand. He talks about books on Instagram @turnsof_fraze.

Every two seconds a person is displaced, caught in one of the more than 40 active conflicts around the world that show no sign of ending. Since 1994, there has been ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has uprooted millions of people and resulted in the deaths of millions more. In the West, we have entered a political era where our border policies are underpinned by unending wars. At this critical juncture, how can journalists, especially those engaged in foreign correspondence, tell these stories? How can they make connections across time and space, and across politics, economics, environments, and crucially, people? Given its colonial history, are these connections possible for the profession of foreign correspondence? In Borderland: Decolonising the Words of War (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Chrisanthi Giotis argues that decolonization is possible and necessary for the development of a truly global, public sphere. New global narratives need to meaningfully include the voices, and knowledge, of those with the least power who are caught in resource-fuelled wars. Drawing on insights from postcolonial studies, international relations, development studies, and philosophy, which are brought to life through auto-ethnographic descriptions and analysis of "behind-the-scenes" events, Giotis introduces new reporting techniques for foreign correspondents. Borderland argues that decolonized reporting techniques will help journalists—and their audiences—move beyond the sociohistorical and political myopia that prevents us from communicating and understanding the reality of a complex world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (Oxford UP, 2022), Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets.  A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

Mercy: Humanity in War (Oxford University Press, 2022) gathers and explores acts of singular mercy, giving them form and substance across wars, causes, and opposing uniforms. These acts demand our attention not only for the moral uplift they supply but because they challenge assumptions about humanity itself. Rising above ordinary courage, they may ultimately transcend our understanding, entering the realm of the ineffable. Nevertheless, as Nolan shows, acts of mercy in war are not the provenance of saints but of ordinary people who perform them at great personal risk. As much or more than the normal war hero stories, we must recognize the extraordinary courage of the merciful in war. Cathal J. Nolan is Professor of History at Boston University, a Progress Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Space technology was developed to enhance the killing power of the state. The Moon landings and the launch of the Space Shuttle were mere sideshows, drawing public attention away from the real goal: military and economic control of space as a source of power on Earth. Today, as Bleddyn E. Bowen vividly recounts in Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space (Oxford UP, 2022), thousands of satellites work silently in the background to provide essential military, intelligence and economic capabilities. No major power can do without them. Beyond Washington, Moscow and Beijing, truly global technologies have evolved, from the ground floor of the nuclear missile revolution to today's orbital battlefield, shaping the wars to come. World powers including India, Japan and Europe are fully realizing the strategic benefits of commanding Earth's 'cosmic coastline', as a stage for war, development and prestige. Yet, as new contenders spend more and more on outer space, there is scope for cautious optimism about the future of the Space Age-if we can recognize, rather than hide, its original sin. Bleddyn E. Bowen is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Leicester, specializing in space policy and military uses of outer space. The internationally recognized author of War in Space, he consults on space policy for institutions including the UK Parliament, the European Space Agency, and the Pentagon. Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated.

Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife?  Combining years of fieldwork and archival research with intensive theoretical interrogations, Ezra Rashkow's book The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, 'Tribes', Extermination and Conservation, 1818-2020 (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a global intellectual history of efforts to ‘protect’ indigenous peoples and their cultures, usually from above. It also offers a critique of the activist impulse to cry ‘Save the tigers!’ and ‘Save the tribes!’ together in the same breath. It is not a history or an ethnography of the tribes of India but rather a history of discourses—including Adivasis’ own—about what is perceived to be the fundamental question for nearly all indigenous peoples in the modern world: the question of survival. Examining views of interlinking biological and cultural (or biocultural) diversity loss in western and central India—particularly in regard to Bhil and Gond communities facing not only conservation and development-induced displacement but also dehumanizing animal analogies comparing endangered tigers and tribes—the book problematizes the long history of human endangerment and extinction discourse. In doing so, it shows that fears of tribal extinction actually predated scientific awareness of the extinction of non-human species. Only by confronting this history can we begin to decolonize this discourse. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Yuval Katz discusses the book The Ethics of Engagement: Media, Conflict and Democracy in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020) by Herman Wasserman. You’ll hear about: The ethical and methodological challenges of studying media in Africa; Why democratization is not a linear process; What tools journalists have at their disposal to support processes of democratization; Reflections on the professional conduct of journalists and what they can do to be more attentive to the needs of ordinary people; Why conflicts are not necessarily detrimental to democracy; Some tips and advice for early career scholars studying the Global South. About the book The book discusses the relationship between media, conflict, and democratization in Africa from the perspective of media ethics. Despite the commonly held view that conflict is a destructive political force that can destabilize democracies, the argument in this book is that while many conflicts can indeed become violent and destructive, they can also be managed in a way that can render them productive and communicative to democracy. Drawing on theoretical insights from the fields of journalism studies, political studies, and cultural studies, the book discusses the ethics of conflict coverage and proposes a normative model for covering conflict and democratization. The book argues for an “ethics of listening” that would enable the media to help de-escalate violent conflict and contribute to the deepening of an agonistic democratic culture in contexts of high inequality, ethnic and racial polarization, and uneven access to media. This argument is illustrated by examples drawn from recent events in African democracies such as student protests, community activism, struggles for resources, and social media conflicts. The book also scrutinizes the media’s ethical roles and responsibilities in African societies by considering questions regarding journalistic professionalism, ethical codes, and regulation in the context of rising misinformation. The book provides a critical African perspective on global debates about media, politics, and democracy and the media’s ethical commitments in contexts of conflict. You can find the book here. Author: Herman Wasserman is a Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of several books, has published widely on media, ethics and democracy in Africa. His awards include the Georg Foster Prize from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Fulbright Fellowship and the Neva Prize for Journalism Theory from the University of St Petersburg, amongst others. Host: Yuval Katz is a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication with a joint appointment at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and the Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS). His work inspects how media help us rethink the relationship between people involved in intractable, violent conflicts. He is currently writing a book titled In Search of a Medium: Palestinian and Jewish Encounters in Media Texts and Industry Practices, where he examines Israeli media spaces in which Israeli Jews and Palestinians collaborate creatively. Editor & Producer: Jing Wang Keywords: Africa, Agonism, Democratization, Journalism Studies, Listening, Media Ethics, Peace Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

If we listen to the politicians and pundits, college campuses have become fiercely ideological spaces where students unthinkingly endorse a liberal orthodoxy and forcibly silence anyone who dares to disagree. These commentators lament the demise of free speech and academic freedom. But what is really happening on college campuses? Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford UP, 2022) shows how misinformation about colleges and universities has proliferated in recent years, with potentially dangerous results. Popular but highly misleading claims about a so-called free speech crisis and a lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses emerged in the mid-2010s and continue to shape public discourse about higher education across party lines. Such disingenuous claims impede constructive deliberation about higher learning while normalizing suspect ideas about First Amendment freedoms and democratic participation. Taking a non-partisan approach, Bradford Vivian argues that reporting on campus culture has grossly exaggerated the importance and representativeness of a small number of isolated events; misleadingly advocated for an artificial parity between liberals and conservatives as true viewpoint diversity; mischaracterized the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces; and purposefully confused critique and protest with censorship and "cancel culture." Organizations and think tanks generate pseudoscientific data to support this discourse, then advocate for free speech in highly specific ways that actually limit speech in general. In the name of free speech and viewpoint diversity, we now see restrictions on the right to protest and laws banning certain books, theories, and subjects from schools. By deconstructing the political and rhetorical development of the free speech crisis, Vivian not only provides a powerful corrective to contemporary views of higher education, but provides a blueprint for readers to identify and challenge misleading language--and to understand the true threats to our freedoms. Bradford Vivian is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and past Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University. His previous books include Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (OUP 2017) and Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (2010), which received the Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address awarded by the National Communication Association. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

Hints on the Art and Science of Government was the first treatise on statecraft produced in modern India. It consists of lectures that Raja Sir T. Madhava Rao delivered in 1881 to Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III, the young Maharaja of Baroda. Universally considered the foremost Indian statesman of the nineteenth century, Madhava Rao had served as dewan (or prime minister) in the native states of Travancore, Indore and Baroda. Under his command, Travancore and Baroda came to be seen as 'model states', whose progress demonstrated that Indians were capable of governing well. Rao's lectures summarise the fundamental principles underlying his unprecedented success. He explains how and why a Maharaja ought to marry the classical Indian ideal of raj dharma, which enjoins rulers to govern dutifully, with the modern English ideal of limited sovereignty. This makes Hints an exceptionally important text: it shows how, outside the confines of British India, Indians consciously and creatively sought to revise and adapt ideals in the interests of progress. The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao's Hints on the Art and Science of Government (Oxford UP, 2021) contains both the newly rediscovered, original lecture manuscripts; and an authoritative introduction, outlining Rao's remarkable career, his complicated relationship with Sayaji Rao III, and the reasons why his lectures have been neglected-until now.

How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America. Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries. Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University ([email protected]).

What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades.  John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information. Emily Steiner is the Rose Family Endowed Chair Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her work on medieval literature and middle English literature and culture. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half of the great vaudeville act, "Buck and Bubbles," with his partner pianist Buck Washington. Brian Harker tells Bubbles' story in Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles, An American Classic (Oxford University Press, 2022). Bubbles’ long career, which largely ended after a stroke in 1967, spanned several significant shifts in American popular entertainment. He started entertaining audiences in vaudeville just as films began to dominate the landscape followed by television. Harker tells the story of Bubbles’ tumultuous life and situates his career as a Black dancer within segregated America and an entertainment industry that perpetuated racist stereotypes and exploited its workers—especially those from minoritized communities. Although Bubbles originated the role of Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, he has largely slipped out of American memory. Harker restores Bubbles to his rightful place as an innovative dancer and an important figure in twentieth-century American popular entertainment. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2023) is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women. Alison Stone is a British philosopher. She is a Professor of European Philosophy in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

To fend off American and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Japan strove to strengthen itself by drawing on the most updated ideas and practices from around the world. By the 1880s, this included the introduction of Western-derived psychiatry and its ideas about mental illness. The first Japanese psychiatrists claimed that mental illnesses required medical treatment in specialized institutions rather than confinement at home, as had been common practice. Yet the state implemented no social welfare policies to make new medical services more accessible and affordable to the public. The family, especially women, thus continued to carry the burden of caring for those considered mad. Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford UP, 2022) examines how the family in Japan came to be seen as the natural provider of care for those suffering from mental illnesses. It centers on the experiences of women and families, which have long been obscured by the voices of male psychiatrists, state officials, and lawmakers. H. Yumi Kim traces how women and families negotiated a dizzying array of claims about madness and its proper management across various settings. In the countryside, psychiatrists tried to refute the notion that fox spirits could cause madness, and the government regulated the use of cage-like structures inside homes. In cities, a booming medical marketplace spread ideas about feminized illnesses such as hysteria, and female defendants were evaluated for menstruation-induced disorders. As women and families navigated this shifting therapeutic landscape, they produced their own gendered approaches to madness that would take precedence over the claims of psychiatry, the law, and the state in everyday life. Decoupling the history of mental illness from the discipline and institutions of psychiatry, Madness in the Family reveals the power and fragilities of gender, kinship, and care in the creation of different modes of caring for and understanding mental illness that persist to this day.

Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived. Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator's dilemma. As Martin K. Dimitrov shows in Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China (Oxford UP, 2023), substantial variability exists in the survival of nondemocratic regimes, with single-party polities having the longest average duration. Offering a systematic theory of the institutional solutions to the dictator's dilemma, Dimitrov argues that single-party autocracies have fostered channels that allow for the confidential vertical transmission of information, while also solving the problems associated with distorted information. To explain how this all works, Dimitrov focuses on communist regimes, which have the longest average lifespan among single-party autocracies and have developed the most sophisticated information-gathering institutions. Communist regimes face a variety of threats, but the main one is the masses. Dimitrov therefore examines the origins, evolution, and internal logic of the information-collection ecosystem established by communist states to monitor popular dissent. Drawing from a rich base of evidence across multiple communist regimes and nearly 100 interviews, Dimitrov reshapes our understanding of how autocrats learn--or fail to learn--about the societies they rule, and how they maintain--or lose--power. Listeners interested in how authoritarian regimes gather information and use it to maintain political control should also check out the NBN interviews with Iza Ding, on how China's bureaucrats make a show of responsiveness even when they can't deliver, Jeremy Wallace, on the role of quantification in China's authoritarianism, Daniel Treisman, on how dictators around the world try to control their public image, Jennifer Pan, on how China uses its limited welfare state to hold power, journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin on China's surveillance state, and Yao Li, Manfred Elfstrom, and Lynette Ong on China's protests. Martin K. Dimitrov is Professor of Political Science at Tulane University.  Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

Broadway has body issues. What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body. In Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford UP, 2023), author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West’s Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside? In answering these questions, Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway’s inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.

Drawing on an ethnographic study of novel readers in Denmark and the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history. The ethnographic approach shows what no historical account of books published during the pandemic will be able to capture, namely the movement of readers between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. The book follows readers who have tuned into novels about plague, apocalypse, and racial violence, but also readers whose taste for older novels, and for re-reading novels they knew earlier in their lives, has grown. Alternating between chapters that analyze single texts that were popular (Albert Camus's The Plague, Ali Smith's Summer, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre) and others that describe clusters of, for example, dystopian fiction and nature writing, this work brings out the diverse quality of the Covid-19 bookshelf. Time is of central importance to this study, both in terms of the time of lockdown and the temporality of reading itself within this wider disrupted sense of time. By exploring these varied experiences, this book investigates the larger question of how the consumption of novels depends on and shapes people's experience of non-work time, providing a specific lens through which to examine the phenomenology of reading more generally. This timely work also negotiates debates in the study of reading that distinguish theoretically between critical reading and reading for pleasure, between professional and lay reading. All sides of the sociological and literary debate must be brought to bear in understanding what readers tell us about what novels have meant to them in this complex historical moment. Ben Davies is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction (2016); editor of John Burnside: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2020); and co-editor of Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011). He has also published articles in journals such as Textual Practice and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Christina Lupton is a professor at the University of Warwick and the University of Copenhagen. She is author of three monographs: Knowing Books (2012), Reading and the Making of Time (2018), and Love and the Novel: Life After Reading (2022), and numerous articles on the topics of reading, time use, and the materiality of books. Johanne Gormsen Schmidt holds a PhD in literature from University of Southern Denmark and is currently a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of several pieces in the fields of literary sociology, comparative and Scandinavian literature, and uses of literature. She is editor of the literary journal Passage. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm.

The concept of bias is familiar enough, partly because it is deployed frequently and in different contexts. For example, we talk about biased jurors, biased procedures, biased laws, biased decisions, and biased people. But we also talk about bias as a feature of certain frames of mind, habits, dispositions, and mental processes. In most of these contexts, bias is seen as a kind of failing or a bad-making feature. Attributions of bias are hence often accusatory, or at least a matter of negative assessment. Although these phenomena are familiar, questions remain. Is bias is a single thing? Is bias always bad? Is bias always misleading? Can bias be eliminated? In Bias: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press, 2023), Thomas Kelly addresses a broad range of such questions. He develops a norm-theoretic account of what bias is, and then explores its implications. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

America's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 is arguably the most important foreign policy choice of the entire post-Cold War era. Nearly two decades after the event, it remains central to understanding current international politics and US foreign relations. In Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford UP, 2023), the eminent historian of US foreign policy Melvyn P. Leffler analyzes why the US chose war and who was most responsible for the decision. Employing a unique set of personal interviews with dozens of top officials and declassified American and British documents, Leffler vividly portrays the emotions and anxieties that shaped the thinking of the president after the shocking events of 9/11. He shows how fear, hubris, and power influenced Bush's approach to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. At the core of Leffler's account is his compelling portrait of Saddam Hussein. Rather than stressing Bush's preoccupation with promoting freedom or democracy, Leffler emphasizes Hussein's brutality, opportunism, and unpredictability and illuminates how the Iraqi dictator's record of aggression and intransigence haunted the president and influenced his calculations. Bush was not eager for war, and the decision to invade Iraq was not a fait accompli. Yet the president was convinced that only by practicing coercive diplomacy and threatening force could he alter Hussein's defiance, a view shared by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other leaders around the world, including Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector. Throughout, Leffler highlights the harrowing anxieties surrounding the decision-making process after the devastating attack on 9/11 and explains the roles of contingency, agency, rationality, and emotion. As the book unfolds, Bush's centrality becomes more and more evident, as does the bureaucratic dysfunctionality that contributed to the disastrous occupation of Iraq. A compelling reassessment of George W. Bush's intervention in Iraq, Confronting Saddam Hussein provides a provocative reinterpretation of the most important international event of the 21st century. Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

The United States is in the midst of a religious revolution. Or, perhaps it is better to say a non-religious revolution. Around a quarter of US adults now say they have no religion. The great majority of these religious “nones” also say that they used to belong to a religion but no longer do. These are the nonverts: think “converts,” but from having religion to having none. Even on the most conservative of estimates, there are currently about 59 million of them in the United States.  Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford UP, 2022) by Professor Stephen Bullivant explores who they are and why they joined the rising tide of the ex-religious. It draws on dozens of interviews, original analysis of high-quality survey data, and a wealth of cutting-edge studies to present an entertaining and insightful exploration of America’s ex-religious landscape. While American religion is not going to die out any time soon, ex-Christian America is a growing presence in national life. America’s religious revolution is not only a religious one—it is catalyzing a profound social, cultural, moral, and political transformation. Stephen Bullivant is Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion at St Mary’s University, London. He is professorial research fellow at University Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia. He holds doctorates in Theology (from Oxford) and Sociology (from Warwick). He joined St Mary’s in 2009, having previously held posts at Heythrop College, London, and Wolfson College, Oxford. He’s also held Visiting fellowship at the Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester, Blackfriars Hall at University of Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University College London.  Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. [email protected] @carrielynnland

In Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (Oxford University Press, 2022), a sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Dr. Amanda Podany takes readers on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived. These life stories are preserved on ancient clay tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to become a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple and their four young children as they suffered through a time of famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to the modern world many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race.  An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficiency, she pivoted from the elite amateur tennis circuit to State Department-sponsored goodwill tours, attempts to find success as a singer and Hollywood actress, the professional golf circuit, a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters and her own professional tennis tour, coaching, teaching children at tennis clinics, and a stint as New Jersey Athletics Commissioner. As she struggled to support herself in old age, she was left with disappointment, recounting her past achievements decades before female tennis players were able to garner substantial earnings. A compelling life and times portrait, Serving Herself offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of a fiercely independent trailblazer who satisfied her own needs and simultaneously set a pathbreaking course for Black athletes.

Buddhists are famous for their thesis that selves do not exist. But if they are right, what would that thesis mean for our apparent sense of self and for ordinary practices involving selves—or at least persons? In Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu’s Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022), Monima Chadha answers these questions by considering Vasubandhu’s arguments against the self. She argues that he—and Abhidharma philosophers like him—denies the existence of selves as well as persons and should take a strongly illusionist stance about our apparent senses of agency and ownership. The book also investigates how Vasubandhu ought to explain episodic memory and synchronic unity of conscious experiences without a self. Chadha weaves together philosophers from a range of traditions, drawing on contemporary and premodern interpreters of Buddhism as well as analytic philosophy, phenomenology and continental philosophy, and modern cognitive science. Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff.

"Why do we think about some practices as work, and not others? Why do we classify certain capacities as economically valuable skills, and others as innate characteristics? What, moreover, is the role of law in shaping our answers to these questions?" These are just some of the queries explored by Dr. Zoe Adams's analysis of the legal construction, and regulation, of work, in her book The Legal Concept of Work (Oxford University Press, 2022). Spanning from the 14th century to the present day, the book explores how the role of law and legal concepts comes to consider some forms of human labour as work, and some forms of human labour as non-work. It examines why perceptions of these activities can change over time, and how legal constitution impacts the way in which work comes to be regulated, organised, and valued. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

In the excellent expansive book, Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qur'anic Commentaries (Oxford UP, 2022), Hadia Mubarak explores the many different interpretations of four Qur’anic verses: 4:128 on nashiz or neglectful husbands, 4:34 on nashiz or rebellious wives, 4:3 on polygyny, and 2:228 on divorce. She does this through a careful examination of four of the most influential Arab male Sunni Qur’anic commentators of the 20th century, namely Seyyed Qutb, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, and Ibn Ashur; she also compares their interpretations with several medieval, pre-modern commentators from the 9th to the 14th centuries. A part of Mubarak’s conclusion is that interpretations of the Qur’an cannot simplistically be reduced to a monolithic assessment like either patriarchal or feminist but that they are an evolving, complex engagement with phenomena such as colonialism, nationalism, modernity, and the commentator’s own personal background. In our conversation today, we discuss the individual modern exegetes on whom this study centers, their specific interpretations of the four verses, the unique ways in which they all depart from their predecessors’ interpretations of these verses, and the limits of the current genre of tafsir studies. For example, must we keep defining tafsir in such a way that it justifies our exclusion of scholarly interpretations of the Qur’an provided by those who have not written a complete commentary on the Qur’an? We also discuss whether the specific interpretations of the four verses are indeed diverse and if so, what exactly are those nuances that express diversity. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at [email protected].

Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017) presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a short and stark proposal of actions everyone-reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature. While Was the Cat in the Hat Black? does not assume it has all the answers to such a deeply systemic problem, its audacity should stimulate discussion and activism. Philip Nel is University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. His many books include Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature (UP Mississippi, 2012), Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (NYU Press, 2008, co-edited with Julia Mickenberg), The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (Random House, 2007), and Dr. Seuss: American Icon (Continuum, 2004). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

Ravana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade.  In Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (Oxford UP, 2022), Justin W. Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impression of Ravana's character, and through the contemporary Ravana revival, which has resulted in the development of an alternative mythological history, depicting Ravana as king of the Sri Lanka's indigenous inhabitants, a formative figure of civilizational antiquity, and the direct ancestor of the Sinhala Buddhist people. Henry offers a careful study of the literary history of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, employing numerous sources and archives that have until now received little to no scholarly attention, as well as the 21st century revision of a narrative of the Sri Lankan people-a narrative incubated by the general public online, facilitated by social media and by the speed of travel of information in the digital age. Ravana's Kingdom offers a glimpse into a centuries-old, living Ramayana tradition among Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka-a case study of the myth-making process in the digital age. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford UP, 2021) offers an important new theory of rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. While the Bible is filled with stories of rape, scholarly approaches to sexual violence in the scriptures remain exhausted, dated, and in some cases even un-feminist, lagging far behind contemporary discourse about sexual violence and rape culture. Graybill responds to this disconnect by engaging contemporary conversations about rape culture, sexual violence, and #MeToo, arguing that rape and sexual violence - both in the Bible and in contemporary culture - are frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky, and that we need to take these features seriously.  Texts after Terror offers a new framework informed by contemporary conversations about sexual violence, writings by victims and survivors, and feminist, queer, and affect theory. In addition, Graybill offers significant new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 34), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1-2), and the unnamed woman known as the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). Texts after Terror urges feminist biblical scholars and readers of all sorts to take seriously sexual violence and rape, while also holding space for new ways of reading these texts that go beyond terror, considering what might come after. Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. Rachel Adelman is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible in the rabbinic program at Hebrew College in Boston.

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope. The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craftsmanship, dissemination, reading and debate. Yet the history of books is not simply a question of material form, nor indeed of the history of reading and reception. The larger question is of the effect of textual production, distribution and reception - of how books themselves made history. To this end, each chapter of this volume, succinctly bounded by period and geography, offers incisive and stimulating insights into the relationship between books and the story of their times. James Raven is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Formerly he was Reader in Social and Cultural History, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. He is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous books in early modern and modern British, European and colonial history, including Judging New Wealth (1992); The Practice and Representation of Reading (1996); The English Novel 1770-1829 (2000); Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing (2000); London Booksellers and American Customers (2002); Lost Libraries (2004); The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (2007); Books between Europe and the Americas (2011); Publishing Business (2014) and Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (2014). Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm.

Pakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn't. Despite prioritization by successive governments, targeted reforms shaped by international development actors, and featuring prominently in Chinese Belt and Road investments, the Pakistani power sector continues to stifle economic and social life across the country. Why? In Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan (Oxford UP, 2022), Ijlal Naqvi explores state capacity in Pakistan by following the material infrastructure of electricity across the provinces and down into cities and homes. Naqvi argues that the national-level challenges of crippling budgetary constraints and power shortages directly result from conscious strategic decisions that are integral to Pakistan's infrastructural state. As he shows, electricity governance in Pakistan reinforces unequal relations of power between provinces and the federal center, contributes to the marginalization of subordinate groups in the city, and cements the patronage-based relationships between Pakistani citizens and the state that have been so detrimental to development progress. Looking through the lens of the electrical power sector, Access to Power reveals how Pakistan actually works, and to whose benefit. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about the all-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency?  Jane Hwang Degenhardt's book Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) addresses these questions by demonstrating how English economic expansion and global transformation produced a new philosophy of fortune oriented around discerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities. The popular theater played an influential role in dramatizing the new prospects and dangers opened up by nascent global economics and fostering a set of ethical practices for engaging with fortune's unpredictable turns. While largely derided as a sinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune made a comeback on the English Renaissance stage as a force associated with valiant risks, ennobling adventures, and purposeful action. The early modern stage also reveals how a new philosophy of fortune led to economic exploitation and racialized exclusions. Offering in-depth discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the history of the English commercial theater--like that of English seaborne expansion--was also a history of fortune. The public theater not only shaped popular understandings of fortune's role in a culture undergoing economic transformation, but also addressed this transformation from a unique position because of its own implication in London commerce, its reliance on paying customers, and its vulnerability to the risks and contingencies of live performance. Drawing attention to an archive of plays dramatizing maritime travel, trade, and adventure, this book shows how the popular stage shaped evolving understandings of fortune by cultivating new viewing practices and mechanisms of theatrical wonder, as well as modeling proper ways of acting in the face of unknown outcomes and contingency. In short, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the public theater offered the first modern understanding of fortune as a globalizing commercial and ethical phenomenon. John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. The Slaves of the Churches: A History (Oxford UP, 2020), the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem. Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices. Mary Sommar has taught ancient and medieval history for the past twenty years, most of them at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She also spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Stephan Kuttner Institute for Medieval Canon Law in Munich, Germany and a year as a Visiting Fellow at Yale University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

In most mainstream traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, women have for centuries largely been excluded from positions of religious and ritual leadership. However, as this volume shows, in an increasing number of late-20th-century and early-21st-century contexts, women can and do undergo monastic and priestly education; they can receive ordination/initiation as Buddhist nuns or Hindu priestesses; and they are accepted as religious and political leaders. Even though these processes still take place largely outside or at the margins of traditional religious institutions, it is clear that women are actually establishing new religious trends and currents. They are attracting followers, and they are occupying religious positions on par with men. At times women are filling a void left behind by male religious specialists who left the profession, and at times they are perceived as their rivals. In some cases, this process takes place in collaboration with male religious specialists, in others against the will of the women's male counterparts. However, in most cases we see both acceptance and resistance. Whether silently or with great fanfare, women are grasping new opportunities to occupy positions of leadership.  Ute Hüsken's Laughter, Creativity, and Perseverance: Female Agency in Buddhism and Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) offers ten in-depth case studies analysing culturally, historically, and geographically unique situations in order to explore the historical background, contemporary trajectories, and impact of the emergence of new and powerful forms of female agency in mostly conservative Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls us to look to the sites of the greatest disadvantage, and take measures aimed at relieving them. This approach favors “race specific” policies for pursuing justice. However, that kind of rationale is increasingly vulnerable in a country that’s largely convinced that it has achieved a “post-racial” condition. Hence the remaining disparities remain, but are explained away by appeals to alleged faults of those who suffer under them. In A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight (Oxford UP, 2023), Derrick Darby defends a different approach. According to Darby, the psychological and social realities of the United States suggest that we must adopt a non-race-specific social justice agenda, explicitly tying our efforts to mitigate unjust inequalities that track racial categorization to “big tent” initiatives to broaden and deepen democratic inclusion for citizens as such. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.