In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Humanities Theory (Oxford UP, 2026) pioneers a new topic: the theory of the humanities. It is an urgent topic right now because the humanities face a suite of forceful new challenges and are in a period of significant change. For these reasons, it has become important to analyse and understand what the humanities are as a whole, beyond disciplinary divisions and yet without resorting to simplistic notions of their worth. Remarkably little attention has been paid to this topic. Most discussions of the humanities have been polemical if not defensive. This book argues that there exists a global humanities world which not only transcends disciplinary divisions but joins the professional academic humanities to a thriving amateur public humanities. This world has no essence, it is plural. Nevertheless, powerful, if contested, ethical orientations run through it and help shape it, including a will to truthfulness, a will to openness and generosity, a will to examine values.In their essays Simon During and Amanda Anderson each bring different emphases to their shared orientation towards a large plural humanities world:During analyses how key disciplines—sociology, philosophy and history—might be used to think about the humanities as a whole and, on this basis, offers some predictions of the future awaiting the humanities.Anderson analyzes media representations of the humanities and considers the general conceptual frameworks through which the humanities focus on value and proffer critique. She analyses a series of examples of contemporary critical engagements in the humanities to press a case for value pluralism in the humanities and the university more broadly. Amanda Anderson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She is the author, most recently, of Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (Oxford, 2018) and Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016). She previously served as the Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell and serves on the advisory board of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). Simon During, educated in New Zealand and at Cambridge, has taught at the University of Melbourne and Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of pioneering work in post-colonialism, cultural studies, and the history of entertainment but in recent years has concentrated on thinking about literature and the humanities under their difficult contemporary conditions 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: here

Political theorist Alisa Kessel (University of Puget Sound) has an important and impressive new book, Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Kessel's research grew out of her work on questions of consent and how consent is embedded within the social contract structure. Initially the plan for the research was to critique this concept of “rape culture” which had found its way into popular discourse as well as academic work and was somewhat unclear in terms of application and understanding. Kessel notes in the book and in our conversations that her thinking about the idea of rape culture owes a great deal to black feminists who had been writing about and discussing the underlying issue at the heart of rape culture, which is not just about violence against women, but more broadly about the political, societal, and cultural dimensions of domination, victimhood, and human value. Rape Fantasies develops this understanding and provides fascinating examples of this intersectional concept. One of the key claims of the book is that sexual violence is not accidental, it is not necessarily based on physical urges that just cannot be controlled; it is, instead, based in the dynamic of political domination thus making rape itself a political act. Part of the unexamined problem with rape is that it is built around an entitlement to dominate, which also makes the threat of sexual violence a political act. Rape Fantasies traces this idea through a number of different case studies that unpack the dimensions of this threat of sexual violence in a variety of circumstances and situations, tied, inevitably, to the duality of domination and subordination or victimization, which is also wrapped up with questions of who is deserving of protection and who is not as deserving. Kessel explains that in examining sexual violence, what she found was multifaceted reflections and refractions, since the issue and the individual's experience with sexual violence are neither simple nor linear. And the examples and case studies that make up the thrust of the book present this multidimensional nature of sexual violence. This multifaceted thinking about sexual violence also integrates an intersectional analysis, drawing on work from indigenous studies, feminist and women's studies, feminist theory, black feminism, political theory and other connected schools of thought. The interrogation of rape and rape culture, particular in context of the political valence, “occurs across multiple axes of oppression, including white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, cisgender, settler colonial, and capitalist axes.”[1] The case study examples in Rape Fantasies include bathroom bills across the states, the idea of the frontier and modes of extraction, consent contracts and consent apps, and OnlyFans and intimacy on demand. Each example is deeply researched and unpacked, providing the reader with historical, legal, political, economic, cultural, and societal analyses of these complex areas of domination and entitlement. Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence is an expansive undertaking, bringing together theoretical frameworks from different schools of thought and analysis, threaded with important case studies that help the reader think deeply about this concept and how it is operationalized in our daily lives. Even if we are not aware of these narratives, they surround us and shape so much of our thinking about how the world works. And why sexual violence remains so persistent. Susan Liebell is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Lilly J. Goren is a Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  [1] Alisa Kessel. Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Oxford University Press, 2025. p. 6.

On March 2, 1945, five Mexican American families and their Jewish American lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, to end the segregation of ethnic Mexican children. In a shocking decision, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, setting a legal and historical precedent in Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County that shook the foundations of Jim Crow America and led to the end of de jure school segregation across the nation. Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals. David-James Gonzales is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

By any measure, Julius Caesar is one of the most significant and famous figures in Roman history. Self-identified as a "popular" politician, he advocated for effective government to better the lives of average Romans,but believed such a government could not be based upon the existing democracy. Only through his personal authority and the massive organization he built to overthrow the government could the prosperity of all Rome's citizens be ensured. Through a careful analysis of the ancient sources, especially Caesar's own writings, David Potter offers us a stunning and original portrait of this great general and statesman. Master of Rome: A Life of Julius Caesar (Oxford UP, 2025) reveals Caesar as a highly organized manager with an extraordinary ability to adjust to circumstances while maintaining the ancient equivalent of a positive "media presence." After his death, Caesar's followers put forward a narrative of his life that made his rise to power seem inevitable, but Caesar's own writing tells us a different story—one of a detail-oriented general who demanded a high degree of accountability from his subordinates.A critical aspect of Caesar's philosophy of command was the need to find room for former enemies to serve in his organization. While this philosophy catapulted Caesar to great fame as a general during the wars in Gaul, when he attempted to put this method into effect in the wake of the civil war that established him as the master of Rome, it led to his brutal assassination in 44 BCE.Master of Rome tells the dramatic story of one of history's most intriguing figures, who rose from the fringes of Roman political society to unprecedented heights. Along the way, Potter identifies the extraordinary qualities that enabled Caesar to dominate the world in which he lived. David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. His previous books include The Origin of Empire: Rome from the Republic to Hadrian, Constantine the Emperor, The Victor's Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, and Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint. 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: here

In this fifth episode of Season 5, I interview Professor Thomas C. Schmidt, a historian who focuses on the New Testament, Patristics, and Eastern Christianity. An Associate Professor at Fairfield University, he is currently a 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Drawing on his new book, Josephus and Jesus (OUP, 2025), we discuss in this Part II of a two-part series the writings of the ancient historian Josephus and what they reveal about the historical identity of Jesus of Nazareth as well as the events surrounding the rise of early Christianity. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison's Notes is the podcast of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison's Footnotes.”

Andrew Lister's Justice and Reciprocity (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls's conception of "justice as fairness." Reciprocity was a central to justice as fairness, but Rawls wasn't explicit about the different forms of reciprocity, nor the diverse roles reciprocity played in his theory. The book's main thesis is threefold. First, reciprocity is not simply a fact of human psychology or a duty, but a limiting condition on other duties. Second, such conditions are a natural consequence of thinking of equality as a relational value. However, third, we can identify limits on this conditionality, which explains how some duties of justice can be unconditional. The book explores the ramifications of this argument in a series of debates about distributive justice: productive incentives, duties to future generations, unconditional basic income, and global justice. In each domain, thinking about reciprocity as a limiting condition helps explain otherwise puzzling aspects of justice as fairness, in some cases making the view more plausible, but in others underlining limits that will be unappealing to egalitarians of a more unilateral bent. Lister ultimately shows that reciprocity involves more than returning benefits, and that limiting justice with reciprocity conditions need not make justice implausibly undemanding. In this way, the book rehabilitates reciprocity for egalitarianism.

How did the far right go from illegitimate fringe to contender for public office, and did Europe have anything to do with it? Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that European integration functioned as an ideological resource for far right parties looking for legitimation because it enabled them to refashion their political message in a more acceptable form, while maintaining the allegiance of their existing supporters.Drawing on the qualitative analysis of over 400 documents produced by the Movimento Sociale Italiano/Alleanza Nazionale in Italy (1978-2009) and the Rassemblement National in France (1978-2019), Lorimer identifies the core concepts and discourses the parties used to talk about Europe, and the legitimation mechanisms associated with them. The book's narrative is developed through the analysis of four key concepts: the concept of identity, which enabled the parties to transnationalise their message and create a positive association between themselves and Europe; the concept of liberty, which made it possible for them to foster an image of actors holding uncontroversial positions; the concept of threat, which helped them promote the idea that 'desperate times call for desperate measures; and the concept of national interest, which helped them stress commitment to core principles in their ideology.Ever since its re-emergence on the European political scene, scholars have sought to explain the mainstreaming of the far right. By understanding how the process of European integration facilitated its transition from the margins to the mainstream, this book adds one piece to the puzzle of far right legitimation. Marta Lorimer is a Lecturer in Politics at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University, where she teaches on European politics and populism, and co-editor of the journal Political Research Exchange. Her research on far-right politics and European integration has been published widely, including in the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

Amir Saemi's exciting book Morality and Revelation in Islamic Thought and Beyond: A New Problem of Evil (Oxford UP, 2024) is a fascinating and deeply thought-provoking study that challenges how we think about scripture, morality, and divine authority. Saemi tackles what he calls the “New Problem of Evil,” a divinely prescribed problem of evil, which is the tension between the commands found in sacred texts, our own moral judgments, and the belief in a morally perfect God. Saemi demonstrates the limits of scripture-first approaches, which is to say that scripture is given precedence over our independent moral judgments in cases where the two conflict. He explores ethics-first solutions that allow the believer to take moral reasoning seriously, while also showing that scripture's injunctions can be understood as legal or social mandates. By tracing the arguments of Ashʿarites, Mu'tazilites, and other medieval Islamic thinkers, and developing alternative solutions, Saemi offers a methodical and historically grounded framework for reconciling moral judgment with scriptural authority. In our conversation, Amir and I explore how Islamic philosophers like al-Ghazālī, al-Rāzī, al-Fārābi, and others navigated the relationship between reason and revelation, and how we might approach morally troubling passages in scripture today, including through an ethics-first approach. We also discuss thick and thin moral concepts, the Moses Principle, and what it means to reconcile modern moral sensibilities with ancient texts. Amir shares insights on gendered morality, the ethical significance of the Abraham story, and the broader implications of his work for progressive Muslims and theists alike. This book is essential reading for readers interested in the ethics of interpretation, the challenges faced by contemporary religious communities when re-interpreting historical texts, theists wrestling with moral dilemmas, and anyone interested in the intersection of philosophy, religion, and ethics.

In this fourth episode of Season 5, I interview Professor Thomas C. Schmidt, a historian who focuses on the New Testament, Patristics, and Eastern Christianity. An Associate Professor at Fairfield University, he is currently a 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Drawing on his new book, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (Oxford UP, 2025), we discuss in this Part I of a two-part series the stupendous life of Josephus, the ancient historian who lived in both elite Jewish and Roman circles his whole life, as well as the cultural, religious, and political world of the New Testament as found in his main works. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison's Notes is the podcast of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison's Footnotes.”

Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom by Mark Pennington This highly original and innovative book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. Divided into two parts the book commences by demonstrating important commonalities between Foucault's ideas and those of a neglected 'post-modern' stream in liberal political and economic thought. These ideas draw on a social theory emphasising a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science highly critical of socio-economic 'scientism' and 'expert rule'; and an understanding of freedom as an open-ended process of 'self-creation' in the face of cultural power relations—a freedom threatened by alignments between state power and more decentred manifestations of power.Part two combines the tools of Foucault's critical social theory with those of a post-modern liberalism to problematise four separate though overlapping 'bio-political' or 'pastoral' dispositifs in contemporary liberal societies focused on social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and law and order. Where the Foucauldian and the post-modern liberal approaches suggest that freedom requires a cultural and economic 'creative destruction' that destabilises existing modes of thought and ways of being, the pastoral dispositifs that seek to 'monitor and correct' multiple pattern anomalies are shown to stifle the space for that creative freedom.Though the book does not engage the question of whether Foucault himself moved towards endorsing liberal political economy, it throws considerable light on how key Foucauldian concerns may be addressed within the liberal tradition, and why Foucauldians may have reason to embrace a reconstituted or post-modern liberalism Mark Pennington has been Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King's College, University of London, since 2012, and is currently Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society. Prior to King's he taught for twelve years in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He has a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. 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: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

Time spent and words spent—what does each signal? Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which one does not belong, or, for a group, to ‘sign' its action as another group. Mimicry exploits the reputation of the model it mimics to avoid capture (flight), to strike undetected at the enemy (fight), or to hide behind or besmirch the reputation of the model group (‘false-flag' operations).  Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a theory and game-theoretic model of mimicry, an overview of its use through history, and a deep empirical exploration of its modern manifestations through several case studies by leading social scientists. The chapters cover mimicry in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, terrorism campaigns in 1970s Italy, the height of the Iraq insurgency, the Rwandan genocide, the Naxalite rebellion in India, and jihadi discussion forums on the Internet. Thomas Hegghammer is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

The Politics of Failed Policies (Oxford UP, 2025) examines how the interplay of politics and data affects when failed policies get recognized. It shows how compelling data and analysis is an important political tool for highlighting failure. Importantly, the research demonstrates how data and analysis themselves are the products of political processes and reflections of those in power. Using case studies from education and juvenile criminal justice and tax policy, the book makes a theoretical contribution to the study of policymaking, state politics, and the role of knowledge and information in contemporary American politics.

A richly detailed collection of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secretly recorded phone conversations from his time in the Nixon administration that touch on every important issue of Kissinger's day and provide a sweeping view of his era.Henry Kissinger is unquestionably one of the most consequential foreign policy makers in American history. A remarkably influential academic during his long tenure at Harvard, Kissinger became Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor in 1969 and Secretary of State in 1973.Like Nixon, Kissinger left a trail of secretly recorded evidence in his wake. Kissinger began taping in 1969, two years before Nixon did in 1971, and he continued taping for over three years after Nixon's recording system was dismantled in 1973. In The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026), Tom Wells draws on his expertise in the Nixon era to provide carefully selected, edited, and annotated transcripts of Kissinger's phone conversations, which chronologically highlight the most momentous crises and controversies of the era. They not only provide context and many revelations on Kissinger's role in numerous events but also throw his personality, character, and checkered record into sharp relief.The conversations cover a wide range of issues, including the Vietnam War, the India-Pakistan conflict, the opening to China, the Middle East, the Greek coup in Cyprus, the Nixon administration's illegal wiretapping, and the Watergate scandal. The transcripts reveal Kissinger's opinions and attitudes on important policy matters and his complex relationship with President Nixon, as well as the many battles he fought with other administration officials and his subtle manipulations of well-known journalists.A richly detailed collection of Kissinger's transcripts and commentary, this book provides a novel window into the Nixon administration and offers a genuinely unique perspective on one of the most important figures in modern American history.

On Feb. 6, 1945, just three days after the U.S. army started to fight the Japanese in the city of Manila, General Douglas MacArthur declared that “Manila had fallen.” In truth, the battle would take another month, as U.S. forces fought their way through block after block. By the end of the battle, which featured some of the most intense urban fighting faced by the U.S. army, Manila was in ruins, the old walled city of Intramuros was flattened, and 100,000 Filipino civilians were dead.  Nicholas Evan Sarantakes writes a comprehensive history of the fighting in The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Oxford UP, 2025) Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of four books, including Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press: 2010) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Battle of Manila. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

In 2012, US President Barack Obama stated that the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons on its population would cross a red line that would require the US government to reconsider its approach to the civil war then underway in Syria. Syria subsequently used such weapons, creating a policy dilemma for the United States about how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's violation of the red line.In Coercing Syria on Chemical Weapons (Oxford UP, 2025), Matthew Moran, Wyn Q. Bowen, and Jeffrey W. Knopf examine efforts by the United States, sometimes acting with France and the United Kingdom, to respond to Syria's possession and use of chemical weapons over the course of its civil war. In particular, they focus on US strategy during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, which relied heavily on coercion, including deterrent and compellent variants. As the authors show, policies directed at the ruling Assad regime in Syria attempted to deter chemical weapons attacks and to compel Syria to give up its chemical arsenal with mixed outcomes. Drawing on the existing literature on deterrence and coercive diplomacy to identify three propositions — concerning credibility, motivations, and assurances — the book explains the mixed record of coercive success and failure and examines how effective coercive strategies were at different points and why.Drawing on the most significant attempt in the post-Cold War era to deter the use of a weapon of mass destruction, this book offers theoretical and practical lessons for both security studies scholars and policymakers. Our guest is Professor Jeff Knopf, a Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), where he serves as chair of the M.A. program in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Options for Success: A PhD's Guide to Navigating Career Transitions and Thriving in Your Next Professional Chapter (Oxford UP, 2025) is a transformative, step-by-step guide designed for early to mid-career academics exploring career paths beyond faculty roles and into careers in industry. This book speaks directly to PhDs asking "What's next?" as they consider their career options beyond the faculty. Blending narrative, practical workbook exercises and real-life examples, Options for Success empowers readers to reimagine their career expectations, navigate the complexities of career transition, and align their professional paths with their personal values and goals.At the heart of this guide is the Options for Success framework, a seven-step process that takes readers through the phases of career change-from Detox, making mental and emotional space for new opportunities, to Onboarding, integrating into new roles with insight into workplace dynamics. With tools like the Ecosystems and Economies framework and Professional Profile Pillars, readers can inventory their skills, evaluate their core strengths, and identify careers that align with their values. The Translational Power of Action Verbs exercise encourages academics to shift from a "knowing lens" to a "doing lens," while the Power Story Method helps them translate their achievements into impactful stories that resonate with potential employers.The book also addresses the "messy middle" of job searching, equipping readers with strategies to maintain momentum and resilience through self-care practices and targeted skills building. Unlike traditional career guides, Options for Success is rich with templates, scripts, and sample materials, from hybrid CV-résumés to informational interview guides and bios, offering readers the practical support they need to articulate their unique value effectively.Career transition stories from PhDs across disciplines illustrate the real-world application of these principles across a range of fields and roles, showing diverse pathways into impactful, fulfilling careers. Written in a coach's voice-approachable, empathetic, and filled with generative questions-Options for Success feels like having a personalized career coach, guiding readers to explore, evaluate, and act with confidence. Options for Success is an essential companion for any PhD ready to transition beyond the faculty and into new professional possibilities. Fatimah Williams, Ph.D., is an executive coach, speaker, and founder of Professional Pathways. A cultural anthropologist with over 15 years of consulting experience, she has advised organizations like the National Institutes of Health, the Urban League, and more than 30 colleges and universities on leadership development, organizational strategy, and career growth. Her thought leadership appears in both academic and popular outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and Essence. A former career services leader at the University of Pennsylvania, she also has served on the board of the University of Virginia Alumni Association and the advisory council of the Zimmerli Art Museum. She is the author of three books, Be Bold, Professional Pathways Planner, and her newest book, Options for Success, published by Oxford University Press, which guides PhDs through career transitions and the messy middle of reinvention. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

Borneo—split between two countries, home to some of the world's oldest rainforests and a vast array of animal and plant life—is back in the news. The island is set to be home to Nusantara, Indonesia's new planned political capital set to, maybe, open in 2028. And the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak—different from the rest of Peninsular Malaysia—are griping for more rights and authority to control its own wealth. Author Olivier Hein tackles the long history of Borneo in his latest book titled, appropriately, Borneo: The History of an Enigma (Hurst, 2025). He tackles Borneo's indigenous communities; the spread of Hindu, Chinese, Muslim and European influence; the rise of the White Rajah; and how Borneo is treated by today's modern nations. A former diplomat with the UN, the OSCE and the UK, Olivier Hein has undertaken postings in Kosovo, Turkmenistan, the USA and France. He is also the author of Star and Key: The Historical Adventure of Mauritius and Mother of the World: The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan. He is also a regular contributor to The Chap magazine. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Borneo. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Katelyn Stauffer, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia, has an excellent new book focusing on how voters and citizens perceive the legitimacy and functionality of political institutions, especially when they think there are women elected to those institutions. The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women's Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the United States (Oxford UP, 2025) weaves together a number of different threads to reach some interesting conclusions about women in elected office and the trust that voters have in those elected offices and institutions. Stauffer starts the research trajectory with a framing around representation, and how the different kinds of representation within elected bodies connects to how voters think about those bodies themselves and whether they trust them and think they are effective. This opens the path to bring in the question of gender, and how voters' or citizens' perceptions of how many women are in legislative bodies also connects with how much trust those same citizens have in those representative bodies. The Politics of Perception explores both accurate perceptions as well as misperceptions about governmental institutions, and this is also where the research is truly fascinating. Part of what the research indicates is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the American public does not actually know a lot about politics or about how political institutions operate. At the same time, many citizens hold strong opinions or thoughts about politics, which generally are at odds with the lack of knowledge. This is also bound up with stereotypes that voters consider in terms of male and female elected officials and how they work within institutions. The Politics of Perception interrogates all of these misperceptions, unpacking the truth or reality versus the ideas that individuals hold about office holders and the political institutions in which those office holders work. Stauffer also discussed how she was able to build on a comparative politics approach, since parliamentary systems are, by their nature, collective institutions, and this approach helped to provide another theoretical framework for the analysis. The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women's Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S. is an important and useful book for many different scholars: those who study American government and politics; scholars of gender and politics, especially in the United States; comparative political scientists; and political theorists exploring issues of representation and democracy. We discussed the Ghost Bookstore in Athens, Georgia as a bookseller that can order The Politics of Perception for readers in Georgia or elsewhere. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement (Oxford UP, 2024) is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy of the campaign and its ultimate failure to win its core demands. The organization used an innovative strategic model and insisted on the importance of worker leadership. And yet allies and staff participated in a campaign that, although continually framed as such, was decidedly not led by workers. Ultimately, Worker Centered challenges conventional notions of political representation, inviting reflection on the complexities of organizing the marginalized and speaking on their behalf. Our guest Biko Koenig is an Assistant Professor in the Government and Public Policy programs at Franklin & Marshall college in Lancaster, PA. He is also co-founder of Research Action, a worker-owned research and organizing firm that performs research and analysis for unions, solidarity economy organizations, community groups and social justice campaigns. Trained as an ethnographer and qualitative specialist at the New School for Social Research, Koenig's research investigates questions of political behavior and mobilization that centers the experiences of everyday actors as they seek to challenge status-quo power relationships. My co-host today is Joe Zerilli, and MA student in the Communication program at Oakland University.

The introduction of the principle of women's reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women's liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of 'reproductive responsibility', or the expectation that individuals perform the 'right' sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms. Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford UP, 2025) breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors - including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments - Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens 'worthy' of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of 'eugenic abortion', used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women's conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally. Guest Dr. Maud Bracke is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, and is also the author of Which Socialism? Whose Detente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 in 2007 and Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy (1968-1983) in 2014, as well as the co-editor of Translating Feminism: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, Place and Agency in 2021. In addition to authoring numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-editing several special issues of academic journalsb she is also an editor at the Journal of Modern European History and sits on various other editorial boards.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

Given the sometimes extraordinary politicization of culture, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries. Sesame Street's global success raises two questions. First, how does a US icon like Sesame Street spread around the world, gaining acceptance as a local cultural product? Second, how does the nonprofit that created it, Sesame Workshop, and its partners around the world navigate cultural differences, manage conflicts, and construct shared collective representations to create Sesame Street programs that resonate with local audiences? In Sesame Street Around the World: Culture, Politics, and Transnational Organizational Partnerships (Oxford UP, 2025), Dr. Tamara Kay answers these questions using data from seven years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and 200 in-depth interviews with Sesame Workshop staff and international partners-including their real-time interactions-from seventeen countries within four regions around the world. Dr. Kay argues that Sesame Workshop's secret is its engagement in coproduction, meaning it works with partners as a transnational team to create local Sesame Street programs together. Through coproduction, Sesame Workshop and its partners create new collective identities by constructing value to align their interests and exchanging complex cultural knowledge to both customize and build alliances. She traces the successive processes of coproduction, beginning with the imagination of the cultural product, to its disassembly, reconstitution, and dissemination. Coproduction privileges the creation of new knowledge that emerges from transnational interaction, and uses that new knowledge to create a hybrid cultural product. The Sesame Street case grapples with and illuminates culture in transnational interaction, providing insight into a range of other transnational organizational partnerships and different kinds of hybrid cultural products. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Working-Class Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939 (Oxford UP, 2025) by Professor Eleanor Gordon, Professor Katie Barclay, and Dr. Jeff Meeks is the first book-length study of the history of working-class courtship and marriage in Scotland, from the establishment of civil registration to the introduction in 1939 of legislation which abolished irregular marriage and introduced civil marriage. Adopting a 'life course' approach, the book explores the social, economic, and cultural contexts of romantic partnerships, from courtship through to marital or family dissolution.Drawing from a wide range of sources that capture official accounts and discourses on the one hand, and the testimony and experience of working-class people on the other, the book offers a uniquely broad and textured view of courtship and marriage in this period. In so doing, it advances recent historiographical debates surrounding marriage in the Anglophone world, particularly the mutability of 'love', and whether the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted a social and cultural 'turning point' for the working classes in terms of choice of marriage partner, the nature of the marital relationship, and the parent-child relationship. The book also engages with debates about extra-marital sexual activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether the family was more or less 'stable' than the contemporary family, and the different ways that marriages broke down before the advent of divorce reform. This has important implications for wider European and North American historiography, and raises timely questions about the primacy of the 'traditional family' in policy and public discourse. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

How can music change people's lives? In Music Refuge: Living Asylum Through Music (Oxford UP, Press 2025) Ailbhe Kenny, an Associate Professor in Music Education at Mary Immaculate College Ireland, explores music programmes for, with and by people seeking asylum in Ireland and Germany. In doing so, the book offers new understandings of the use, practice and meaning of music in people's lives, whether as musicians or as listeners. Exploring a range of settings for music, from listening on phones and shared music making experiences, to parties and performances, the book demonstrates music's profound impact. Filled with stories of refugees' experiences, alongside rich and deep analysis, the book is essential reading across the arts and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in music's place in promoting our shared and common humanity.

The battlefields were not the only places that threatened death during World War I. As conflict raged on and supply lines tightened, the allied powers of France, Britain, and Italy faced a fundamental problem: keeping their soldier and civilian populations safe from starvation. Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War (Oxford UP, 2025) describes how, faced with this immense challenge, the Allies devised a multilateral institution--the Wheat Executive--to do what no state could do alone. Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast examine the difficult considerations made by the allied powers when ceding authority to an international body that would make decisions for them. Beyond successfully managing wheat shipping and distribution, they argue, the Wheat Executive proved to have significant influence in the evolving landscape of interstate cooperation. As a case study, the Wheat Executive improves our understanding of international institutional design, the importance of commodities during wartime, economic coordination amongst wartime coalition members, and the legacies of international cooperation during the First World War. As one of the first great experiments in supranationalism, the Allies' management of wheat while at war provides lessons about the emergence of international organizations and their contours. Jobie Turner is a military historian who studies logistics in warfare.  His most recent work is Feeding Victory:  Innovative Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh, 1755-1968 which discuss the impact of technology on transportation across three centuries of warfare.  Jobie is a retired Colonel in the USAF and a pilot for United Airlines email: here 

Jewish law, known as halakhah, is a unique legal system that has developed over a period of nearly two millennia, across multiple continents, and in innumerable different contexts. Dealing not only with ritual, Jewish law extends to virtually every aspect of life including ethics, business, war, and sex. This Handbook highlights foundational questions about the nature of Jewish law, emphasizing what distinguishes it from other legal systems and illuminating its vitality throughout history. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law (Oxford UP, 2025) navigates core issues such as halakhah's authority, its interpretation, and the meaningfulness of an ancient legal system in a modern period. With contributions from an interdisciplinary cast of authors, the Handbook spans law, history, sociology, and religion. Its chapters draw from a wide range of sources, including traditional texts such as Mishnah and Talmud, rabbinical codes, and legal opinions known as responsa. Moreover, chapters addressing pressing modern issues cover the material from diverse denominational perspectives. As halakhah remains deeply woven into the fabric of Jewish life and scholarship, The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law offers readers an in-depth understanding of this rich and enduring legal tradition. Zev Eleff is President and Professor of American Jewish history at Gratz College. Roberta Rosenthal Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at DePaul University College of Law. Chaim Saiman is Chair in Jewish Law at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Mentioned in this episode: Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks, Holy Rebellion: Religious Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism and Women's Rights in Israel (Brandeis University Press, 2024). Shari Rabin and Michael R. Cohen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of American Jewish History (Oxford University Press, 2025). Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, Remix Judaism: Preserving Tradition in a Diverse World (‎Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022). Chaim N. Saiman, Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law (Princeton University Press, 2018). Benjamin Steiner, Translating the Ketubah: The Jewish Marriage Contract in America and England (University Alabama Press, 2025). Essays from the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law: Chapter 15: Chaim Saiman, “Formalism in Jewish Law.” Chapter 19: Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, “Lawmaking in the Conservative Movement: A Balance of Law and Norms.” Chapter 21: Arye Edrei, “The Impact of Zionism on Jewish Law.” Chapter 24: Rachel Levmore and Steven Gotlib, “Divorce and Agunah: Halakhic Responses to Modernity.” Chapter 30: Zev Eleff, “Judaism and the Modern Family.”

Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford UP, 2024) by Dr. Allison Powers offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power-one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property.Through attention to the consequences of their unexpected claims, Dr. Powers demonstrates how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal.Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire-and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer re-examines empire as process—and Ireland's role in it—through the lens of early modernity. It covers the two hundred years, between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, that equate roughly to the timespan of the First English Empire (c.1550-c.1770s). Ireland was England's oldest colony. How then did the English empire actually function in early modern Ireland and how did this change over time? What did access to European empires mean for people living in Ireland? This book answers these questions by interrogating four interconnected themes. First, that Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, Second, that the Irish operated as agents of empire(s). Third, Ireland served as laboratory in and for the English empire. Finally, it examines the impact that empire(s) had on people living in early modern Ireland. What becomes clear is that colonisation was not a single occurrence but an iterative and durable process that impacted different parts of Ireland at different times and in different ways. That imperialism was about the exercise of power, violence, coercion and expropriation. Strategies about how best to turn conquest into profit, to mobilise and control Ireland's natural resources, especially land and labour, varied but the reality of everyday life did not change and provoked a wide variety of responses ranging from acceptance and assimilation to resistance. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American political philosophy and media studies. Lippmann coined or popularized several keywords of the twentieth century, including "stereotype," the "Cold War," and the "Great Society." Sought out by U.S. Presidents and by America's allies and rivals around the world, Lippmann remained one of liberalism's most faithful proponents and harshest critics. Yet few people then or since encountered the "real" Walter Lippmann. That was because he kept crucial parts of himself hiding in plain sight. His extensive commentary on politics and diplomacy was bounded by his sense that America had to adjust to the loss of a common faith and morality in a "post-Christian" era. Over the course of his life, Lippmann traded in his fame as a happy secularist for the stardom of a grumpy Western Christian intellectual. Yet he never committed himself to any religious system, especially his own Jewish heritage. Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor (Oxford University Press, 2023) considers the role of religions in Lippmann's life and thought, prioritizing his affirmation and rejection of Christian nationalisms of the left and right. It also yields fresh insights into the philosophical origins of modern American liberalism, including liberalism's blind spots in the areas of sex, race, and class. But most importantly, this biography highlights the constructive power of doubt. For Lippmann, the good life in the good society was lived in irreconcilable tension: the struggle to be free from yet loyal to a way of life; to recognize the dangers yet also the necessity of civil religion; and to strive for a just and enduring world order that can never be. In the end, Lippmann manufactured himself as the prophet of limitation for an extravagant American Century. Mark Thomas Edwards is professor of US history and politics at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable. In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks exacerbating food injustices, and risks negative outcomes for animals. If so, then maybe non-vegan food systems would be preferable to vegan food systems, if they could respect animal rights. Could they? The author provides a rigorous analysis of the ethics of farming invertebrates, producing plant-based meats, developing cultivated animal products, and co-working with animals on genuinely humane farms, arguing that these possibilities offer the chance for a food system that is non-vegan, but nonetheless respects animals' rights. He argues that there is a way for us to have our cake, and eat it too, because we can have our cow, and eat her too. Josh Milburn is a British philosopher and a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University. He has previously worked at the University of Sheffield, the University of York, and Queen's University (in Canada), before which he studied at Queen's University Belfast and Lancaster University. He is the author of Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022), and the regular host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals. Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

An authoritative history of the radical environmental movement in the United States, No Option But Sabotage explores how far activists are willing to go to defend the planet in the face of repression and the escalating climate crisis. After 9/11, the radical environmental movement was considered the number one domestic terror threat by the U.S. government. But by the end of the decade the movement had largely gone silent. What happened? And given the threat from climate, why haven't more radical tactics re-emerged? In No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2026), Thomas Zeitzoff traces the origins, rise, fall, and potential rise again of the movement. Using in-depth interviews with past and current activists, as well as experts, Zeitzoff covers the main factions and actors. These include: Earth First! and its early advocacy for "monkeywrenching;" the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and his years-long anti-technology bombing campaign; the connections between animal liberation, punk, and the emergence of the Earth Liberation Front and its arson campaign; and more recent climate activists and their use of disruptive tactics. Along with providing a comprehensive overview of the movement and its various sub-movements that emerged over time, Zeitzoff also asks the bigger question-given the scope and threat from climate change why haven't activists escalated their tactics? Property destruction, sabotage, and even arson were once regular features of the movement in the 1990s and early 2000s--will activists use them again, or will they stick to non-violence? Will the threat of increasing state repression scare activists, or radicalize them? Not just a history of a major extremist movement, this book tells the story of radical environmentalism and highlights how activists are confronting the dual threats of climate change and repression, and asking themselves how far they are willing to go to protect the planet. Thomas Zeitzoff is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. His research focuses on political violence, social media, and political psychology. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

All over the world, masses of people watch, follow, document, and obsess over baseball. Everything remarkable about the impact of baseball derives from the game's history and cultural status as events that draw people together in these ways. Understanding baseball as a cultural phenomenon is therefore less a matter of mastering the vocabulary of the game or merely recollecting its iconic stadiums, players, and stats. While all those details compel insiders and inspire fans, baseball's peculiar and persistent appeal can only be understood by adopting a wider lens. It requires reckoning with the history of structured competition. The classic backyard game of catch between a father and son draws meaning from its associations with the organized sport and its history. The challenge lies less in finding one perfect spot to look, but rather in identifying the many different places where baseball has accumulated significance. Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2026) reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of the game by exploring both baseball's unusual features and the sport's many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, it abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play. Instead, David M. Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. Here, we are shown how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world. David M. Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught courses on society and culture in nineteenth-century America for close to three decades. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

This episode is brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. African Climate Futures (Oxford UP, 2025) shows how climate-changed futures are imagined in Africa and by Africans, and how these future visions shape political debates and struggles in the present. Scientific climate scenarios forecast bleak futures, with increased droughts, floods, lethal heatwaves, sea level rises, declining crop yields, and greater exposure to vector-borne diseases. Yet, African climate futures could also encompass energy transitions and socio-economic revolutions, transformed political agency and human subjectivities, and radically reparative more-than-human climate politics. At the heart of the book is an original and interdisciplinary approach. It studies official climate policy strategies and fictional texts side-by-side, as ecopolitical imaginaries that envision low-carbon, climate-changed futures, and narrate pathways from 'here' to 'there'. It discusses net zero strategies from Ethiopia, The Gambia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe and draws on postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory, arguing that Africanfuturist climate fiction can inspire more radical, reparative, more-than-human ecopolitical imaginaries. These stories can help us to understand the debts we all owe, imagine what reparations might entail, and explore the contours of living convivially alongside more-than-human others in heterotopian, climate-changed futures. Stories can help explore how we might feel in climate-changed futures and can help us to narrate a path through them. This book uses Africanfuturist climate fiction to inspire new ways of challenging and enriching theoretical debates in global climate change politics, including how we understand the places, temporalities, ecologies, and politics of climate futures. If we want to survive to tell new stories in liveable futures then we need to urgently and radically transform carboniferous capitalism. Carl Death joined the University of Manchester in August 2013 as a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy, after four years in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, and a year in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. He has conducted research in South Africa, Tanzania and the USA, and has held visiting researcher positions at The MacMillan Centre for International and Area Studies and the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University; the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; Stellenbosch University; and the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. Pauline Heinrichs is a Lecturer in War Studies (Climate and Energy) at King's College London. Her research focuses climate and energy security. Pauline has worked with and led international teams in conflict and post-conflict countries such as Ukraine and the Baltic States, leading on qualitative methods and strategic narrative analysis. Pauline has also been a climate diplomacy professional working in foreign policy, and an international climate think tank.

What seems mundane today—walking into a supermarket, picking up goods, and paying at a checkout—was once a radical experiment. In our latest New Books Network episode, I speak with Andrew Godley about The Making of the Modern Supermarkett: Self-Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975 (Oxford UP, 2025), co-authored with Bridget Salmon, former archivist at J. Sainsbury plc. This is a book about far more than shopping. It is a history of technology, management, urban planning, consumer behaviour, and how everyday routines were quietly transformed in post-war Britain. Drawing on rare corporate archives, Godley and Salmon reveal how supermarkets were not inevitable but carefully designed organisations shaped by strategic choices, technological constraints, and shifting consumer expectations. In the conversation, we explore how self-service reshaped labour and productivity, why Sainsbury's distinctive commitment to fresh meat helped define the one-stop supermarket, and how planning initiatives such as the New Towns and Abercrombie's vision for London influenced retail geography. We also discuss early experiments with computerised ordering, the limits of technological modernisation, and what Sainsbury's story can—and cannot—tell us about the wider evolution of retailing in Britain and Europe. Finally, Andrew reflects on the surprises hidden in corporate archives and what the history of supermarkets can teach us about today's transformations—from online grocery shopping to automated checkouts. If you have ever wondered how the modern supermarket came to be—and what it reveals about capitalism, technology, and everyday life—this episode is for you.

In The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India (Oxford UP, 2025), Elaine Fisher reconstructs Vīraśaiva origins from unstudied multilingual archives, overturning the conventional narrative of a monolingual Kannada bhakti movement protesting Sanskrit Brahmanism. The evidence reveals Vīraśaivism as multilingual from inception—its anti-caste inheritance deriving from Sanskrit Śaiva tradition, not rejecting it. Fisher proposes a "linguascape" model replacing unidirectional vernacularization with multidirectional flows through which local Vīraśaivisms were translated into being across south India.

Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America. But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic. In Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape (Chelsea Green, 2026) Manchán Magan explores the enchantment, sublime beauty and sheer oddness of a 3000-year-old lexicon. Imbuing the natural world with meaning and magic, it evokes a time-honoured way of life, from its 32 separate words for a field, to terms like loisideach (a place with a lot of kneading troughs), bróis (whiskey for a horseman at a wedding), and iarmhaireacht (the loneliness you feel when you are the only person awake at cockcrow). Told through stories collected from Magan's own life and travels, Thirty-Two Words for Field is an enthralling celebration of Irish words, and a testament to the indelible relationship between landscape, culture and language. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

While we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmic cases – a dog, a starfish, a bacterium – our ordinary criteria for distinguishing one individual from another are inadequate for making these distinctions in general. If a starfish can literally split itself in two and each half regenerates into a new starfish, why hold that there was just one starfish to begin with rather than many? In The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology (Oxford UP, 2025), Ellen Clarke defends the idea of evolutionary individuals: units created and maintained by mechanisms that ensure the parts share a common fate. Such individuals enable good evolutionary bookkeeping, in particular our ability to predict which variations in these individuals will enable natural selection to occur. Clarke, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds, considers the merits of her view in relation to alternatives, how her view explains the emergence of new levels of biological individuality, and how the need for idealization and scientific choice of individual boundaries can avoid conventionalism about biological individuals.

In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Professor Daniel Langton, author of Darwin in the Jewish Imagination: Jews' Engagement with Evolutionary Theory (Oxford UP, 2026), to explore how Jewish thinkers responded to one of the most disruptive ideas of the modern world: evolutionary theory. Spanning a century of debate, the conversation traces how traditionalists, reformers, secular intellectuals, mystics, and philosophers reimagined Judaism in light of Darwin—from Europe to the United States. Rather than a simple science-versus-religion clash, Langton reveals a rich and creative dialogue shaped by modernity, Jewish-Christian relations, and a distinctive Jewish tendency toward pan(en)theistic thinking—understanding God as deeply intertwined with an evolving universe. Together, Katz and Langton explore how Darwin forced Jewish thinkers to rethink creation, divine action, and morality, and how those debates continue to shape modern Jewish belief and identity. Daniel Langton is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and a leading scholar of modern Jewish thought and Jewish-Christian relations. His work focuses on how Jews have engaged major intellectual movements of modernity, including science, philosophy, and theology. Rabbi Marc Katz is a congregational rabbi, author, and teacher whose work bridges classical Jewish texts and contemporary cultural questions. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life and writes widely on Judaism, ethics, and modern life.

In this book, What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2024), Professor J. L. Schellenberg links facts about human intellectual and moral development to what any God who existed at the time of Jesus would have known, and on the basis of that connection, it crafts twenty new arguments for the conclusion that classical Christian doctrine is false. These arguments represent what Schellenberg calls “the problem of contrary development.” Human origins in deep time, human religion, the formation of the New Testament, human psychology, violence, sex, and gender—advances in our understanding on all these fronts are brought into interaction with the doctrines of sin, spiritual helplessness, salvation, the divinity of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and revelation, with the result that the latter are shown to be vulnerable to refutation in new ways. The book concludes by developing, in connection with its results, two Christian versions of the problem of divine hiddenness and an argument against the existence of God from the historical success (but salvific failure) of Christianity. By taking account of all these things, philosophers can bring a better balance to work on Christianity in philosophy, negotiating a shift from Christian philosophy to the philosophy of Christianity. JL Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He did his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, resulting in the book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell, 1993), which introduced a new argument against the existence of a personal God known as the hiddenness argument. … Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland.bsky.social

Human geography offers answers to some of the most important challenges of our time. To understand contemporary struggles over global economic inequality, forced migration, racial injustice, gender justice, and the climate crisis, we must grasp the ways in which these are fought over and through space. Human Geography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Patricia Daley and Ian Klinke explains how the subject can aid a better knowledge of the modern world. It examines the formation of power systems and the ways in which they have been constructed, subverted, and resisted over time. This Very Short Introduction explores the topic through seven spaces that define the present: the colony, the pipeline, the border, the high rise, the workplace, the conservation area, and outer space. In addition, the authors take a critical view of the discipline and its history, but argue for its continuing vitality. Patricia Daley is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa at University of Oxford. Ian Klinke is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

“Liberal egalitarianism” refers to a family of political views that are “liberal” in taking individual rights to be of premier importance and “egalitarian” in holding that justice requires that political, social, and economic inequalities be minimized as much as possible. The standard approach to liberal egalitarian theorizing, influenced greatly by John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), is to specify a set of normative principles to guide the design and functioning of society's primary institutions (its “basic structure”). In The Anatomy of Justice: On the Shape, Substance, and Power of Liberal Egalitarianism (Oxford UP, 2024), Gina Schouten argues for a reorientation in liberal egalitarian theorizing about justice. She proposes that, instead of prescriptive principles, we should instead think of a liberal egalitarian theory's most important product to be “evaluative discernment”: theorizing should aim to discern those achievements or values the realization of which would make society more just overall. Schouten offers a weighted specification of the values of justice, what she calls “the anatomy of justice.” The anatomy of justice is deployed by Schouten to help resolve difficulties internal to liberal egalitarianism, in part by deflating longstanding debates, like that regarding whether equality is fundamentally a distributive or a relational value. The anatomy of justice is also used by Schouten to provide systematic and compelling guidance for addressing existing injustices and to defend liberalism from criticisms from the left. The book thus aims to demonstrate the vitality and relevance of feminist liberal egalitarianism.

Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic. In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression. 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.

Today I talked to John L. Rudolph about his book Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should) (Oxford UP, 2023). Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more -- or so we think. But what if all this is simply wrong? What if the benefits we assume science education produces turn out to be an illusion, nothing more than wishful thinking? John L. Rudolph is Vilas Distinguished Achievement professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has affiliate appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Robert and Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and is the past editor-in-chief of the Wiley & Sons journal Science Education. Prior to his faculty appointment, he taught physics, chemistry, and biology in middle schools and high schools across Wisconsin. 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.