In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

There has been a recent trend in books that explore one year in detail: 1914, 1927, and 1968 have all received this treatment. E. Douglas Bomberger’s new book Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture from Oxford University Press (2018) is new twist on this phenomenon. Rather than primarily trace historical events while touching on cultural matters as many of these books do, Bomberger follows the events in jazz and classical music during this crucial year while framing them within America’s entry into World War One. Written for the general public as well as a scholarly audience, each chapter puts the events of one month in conversation with each other, allowing readers to grasp the busy cultural landscape in the period. Bomberger focuses on eight key figures. Classical musicians Fritz Kreisler, Karl Muck, Walter Damrosch, Olga Samaroff, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink contended with the fallout from mounting anti-German feeling within the United States in different ways as audiences turned against the German music which was the core of their repertory, and viewed German musicians with suspicion. Only Olga Samaroff was born in the US. The others were German-speaking, and some were not U.S. citizens. Through canny marketing and patriotic concerts, Ernestine Schumann-Heink maintained her singing career even though she had sons fighting on both sides of the conflict, while conductor Karl Muck ended up in an internment camp. Meanwhile popular musicians Freddie Keppard, Dominc LaRocca, and James Reese Europe worked to establish their careers and popularize the fledging musical style of jazz. James Reese Europe spent most of the year staffing and then training the band for the Fifteenth Regiment (Colored) of the New York National Guard, an all-black unit that went on to distinguish itself in battle, but not before encountering racism at home. Bomberger also explains the legal and recording challenges jazz musicians faced in 1917. Over the course of the book, Bomberger skillfully makes the case that 1917 saw crucial developments in American music that changed the cultural landscape in the United States forever. E. Douglas Bomberger is Professor of Musicology at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. A prolific author, Bomberger has published six books and over one hundred articles on subjects ranging from the medieval origins of keyboard instruments to mid-twentieth century American music. His primary research areas are in the piano literature, nineteenth-century American music, and transatlantic musical connections. He received the Elizabethtown College 2018–2019 Ranck Prize for Research Excellence. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits representations, or internal states that carry information about the world and that are used by the system to guide its behavior. Naturalistic theories of representation provide explanations of what information, or content, these internal states carry, and how they come to have the contents that they do. In Representation in Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2018), Nicholas Shea approaches the problem from the perspective of the role that the contents of subpersonal states play in explanations of a system’s behavior. Shea, who is professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London, offers a theory that integrates two main components – task functions and exploitable relations – into a pluralist view called Varitel Semantics. He presents and defends his account and considers how it fares in relation to competitor theories.

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything, however, and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit. Ever since, with the rise of science and decline of religious belief, there has been growing interest––and growing doubt––about whether human life really does have meaning. If it does, where might we find it? Historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse investigates this question in his new book A Meaning to Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) asking whether we can find a new meaning to life within Darwinian views of human nature. Rather than promoting a bleak nihilism, many Darwinians think we can convert Darwin into a form of secular humanism. Ruse explains, in a tradition going back to the time of Darwin himself, positive meaning is found in continuing and supporting the upwards path of life provided by the process of evolution itself. However, this is a false turn, he argues, because there is no real progress in the evolutionary process. Rather, meaning in the Darwinian age can be found if we turn to a kind of Darwinian existentialism, seeing our evolved human nature as the source of all meaning, both in the intellectual and social worlds. Ruse argues that it is only by accepting our true nature, evolved over millennia, that humankind can truly find what is meaningful. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, The Darwinian Revolution, and On Purpose.

John Dryden is often regarded as one of the most conservative writers in later seventeenth-century England, a time-serving “trimmer” who abandoned his early commitments to the English Republic to become the poet laureate and historiographer royal of Charles II’s new regime. But, as this important new book demonstrates, Dryden never entirely left behind the ideas – and worries – about inspiration that shaped his early political and creative experiences. John West, who is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Warwick, has written a brilliant new book, Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion and Politics in Restoration England (Oxford University Press, 2018), which opens up the sustained ambiguities of his subject’s interest in inspiration. With an agenda that promises to re-shape the literary history of the later seventeenth century, Dryden and enthusiasm is a defining study of a complex and contradictory literary figure. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war. The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will.

Neoliberal policies have been a primary feature of American political economy for decades. In Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Matt Guardino focuses on the power of corporate news media in shaping how the public understands the key policy debates during this period. Based on a range of evidence from the Reagan Revolution into the Trump administration, he explains how profit pressures in the media have narrowed and trivialized news coverage and influenced public attitudes in the process. Guardino is associate professor of political science at Providence College.

We’re all familiar with the ways in which speech can cause harm. For example, speech can incite wrongful acts. And I suppose we’re also familiar with contexts in which a person who occupies a position of authority can harm others simply by speaking – as when a boss announced and thereby institutes a discriminatory office policy. In such cases, the announcement is itself a harm in addition to the harm of the instituted policy – the boss’s announcement constitutes a harm and does not only cause harm. Once we’ve see the ways in which authoritative speech can constitute harm, we might look for mechanisms other than speaker authority by means of which speech can be constitutively harmful. In her new book, Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm (Oxford University Press, 2019), Mary Kate McGowan identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech can be harm. On her analysis, one needn’t be positioned in an authoritative role to speak in ways that constitute harm. Rather, everyday communicative acts can constitute – and not simply cause – harm. Mary Kate is the Margaret Capp Distinguished Alumna Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works primarily in metaphysics, philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of law.

One of the first and most famous of Christian martyrs was Perpetua, who died in Carthage in the early 3rd century CE. Though there is no record of her life beyond the details contained in a single text, in her book Perpetua: Athlete of God(Oxford University Press, 2018), Barbara K. Gold analyzes the account of her sacrifice and draws upon the dual contexts of the Christian and Roman worlds of that time to provide a framework for understanding her. Central to this effort is the "Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis," one of the earliest Christian texts and one which presents an incomplete and often confusing picture of Perpetua as a woman. As Gold explains, the gendering of her depiction reveals much about the complexities of her portrayal in the work, which posed a number of challenges for subsequent generations of male authors and Christian leaders in terms of the example she set with the martyrdom described within it.

Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights(Oxford University Press, 2019) by Zachary Kramer (Oxford University Press, 2019) sets forth an imaginative critique of the way that civil rights law currently fulfills its mission. Using stories that lucidly illustrate the gap between the aspiration of civil rights law and the lived reality, Professor Kramer proposes a new approach. Drawing on existing protections for disability and for religious practice, Professor Kramer outlines the way that a right to personality, combined with an accommodation-focused inquiry, could update and refresh our approach to civil rights. Zachary Kramer is Associate Dean of Faculty, Professor of Law, and Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Künga Tenje is an independent librarian in Virginia.

In her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doing, she moves beyond a simple analysis of objectification to reveal the powerful role Ornamentalism plays in constituting modern ideas of personhood, racialized femininity and the figure of the Asian woman. Drawing on examples from the realms of law, popular culture and art from the 19th and 20th centuries, Cheng deepens our understanding of racial formation by demonstrating how race and gender are conceived not only in relation to the body, but inorganic ornamentation as well. Anne A. Cheng is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Princeton University. Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017).

"Dear Brother," Jane Manning James wrote to Joseph F. Smith in 1903, "I take this opportunity of writing to ask you if I can get my endowments and also finish the work I have begun for my dead .... Your sister in the Gospel, Jane E. James." A faithful Latter-day Saint since her conversion sixty years earlier, James had made this request several times before, to no avail, and this time she would be just as unsuccessful, even though most Latter-day Saints were allowed to participate in the endowment ritual in the temple as a matter of course. James, unlike most Mormons, was black. For that reason, she was barred from performing the temple rituals that Latter-day Saints believe are necessary to reach the highest degrees of glory after death. A free black woman from Connecticut, James positioned herself at the center of LDS history with uncanny precision. After her conversion, she traveled with her family and other converts from the region to Nauvoo, Illinois, where the LDS church was then based. There, she took a job as a servant in the home of Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of the LDS church. When Smith was killed in 1844, Jane found employment as a servant in Brigham Young's home. These positions placed Jane in proximity to Mormonism's most powerful figures, but did not protect her from the church's racially discriminatory policies. Nevertheless, she remained a faithful member until her death in 1908. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first scholarly biography of Jane Manning James. Quincy D. Newell chronicles the life of this remarkable yet largely unknown figure and reveals why James's story changes our understanding of American history. Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American religious history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books, 2018). He has taught history courses at the University of Detroit Mercy and Florida Atlantic University, and currently, he works as a research archivist for a private library/archive in Detroit, Michigan.

Guy Beiner, who is professor of modern history at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has written one of the longest and certainly one of the most extraordinary recent contributions to the historiography of Ireland and of memory studies. His new book, Forgetful Remembering: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster(Oxford University Press, 2018), argues for the complexities and ambiguities of communal recollection by focusing on the contested memories of one of the shortest and certainly the bloodiest of politically driven Irish insurrections. In 1798, Catholics, protestants and dissenters joined together in armed uprisings against British state forces. Their defeat was followed by prolonged and traumatic reprisals, and by the union of the British and Irish parliaments to create a new “United Kingdom.” Within a decade of their participation in the rebellion, protestants and dissenters had swung to support the new state, beginning a long process of forgetting and remembering that continues to the present day. How and why do communities forget and remember these moments of collective trauma? Beiner’s ground-breaking argument offers new insights, new lines of inquiry, and some startling new conclusions. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Dr. Deonnie Moodie is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions at the University of Oklahoma. Her book, The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines the history of the Kalighat temple of Kolkata and how that temple has been a symbol for competing expressions of Bengali middle class modernity. Shandip Saha is associate professor of Religious Studies at Athabasca University, the world leader in the realm of distance education and open learning. His research interests focus on religion and politics in pre-modern North India and on the changing performance practices in devotional music in India and Pakistan.

Lindsey N. Kingston’s new book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2019) interrogates the idea of citizenship itself, what it means, how it works, how it is applied and understood, and where there are clear gaps in that application. This is a wide-ranging, rigorously researched examination of citizenship, statelessness, and human movement. And it is vitally relevant to contemporary discussions of immigration, supranationalism, understandings of national borders, and concepts of belonging. Not only does Kingston delve into theoretical concepts of citizenship and statelessness, she also integrates analyses of various kinds of hierarchies of personhood in context of these broader issues. The research also includes explorations of nomadic people, indigenous nations, and "second class" citizens in the United States within this theoretical framework of citizenship and statelessness. This careful and broad analysis defines the novel idea of ‘functional citizenship’, which is both theoretical and practical in considering citizenship and statelessness in our modern world. Fully Human focuses on the promises and protections that are outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, unpacking the protection gaps and difficulties that have become clearer and more acute in this era of globalization and security concerns, and highlighting some of the key problems with the current human rights regimes that are in place.

Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

It is an article of faith in many circles that the most effective and efficient way to solve a broad range of local and national problems is through public-private partnerships. What’s not to like? Especially in a climate in which people think resources are scarce, seeking out help from corporate actors seems an obvious win-win. But it’s not. Listen to Jonathan H. Marks discuss The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the public harm and private profiteering that are too often the result of these relationships. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

In The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation (Oxford University Press, 2018), Abraham Singer essentially marries together two disciplinary schools of thought and approaches to understand and consider the corporate firm. In his work, Singer takes seriously the idea, structure, function, and position of the firm, as distinct from markets, within modern societies. Singer notes that the thrust of the book is “to articulate a normative theory of the corporation that synthesizes economic and political insights” and positions these understandings within the political and economic realities of contemporary capitalism and liberalism. Singer analyzes and explores the historical and theoretical development of firms and corporations, integrating economic and political theory as the dual lenses through which to consider not only the firms themselves but also their position and function within political societies, since “corporations serve economic ends, but through political means.” The Form of the Firm considers how and in what ways firms can and should contribute to and sustain the values, particularly the political values, that define and inform the world in which they exist. This analysis has broad and interdisciplinary appeal, especially for political theorists, economists, political scientists, managerialists, legal and regulatory experts, ethicists, and those in corporate governance.

Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses on later visual politics in his new book, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book examines the use of photographs by slaves, abolitionists, slaveholders, and Union soldiers to explore the rich complexities of the visual politics of the moment. He also considers the legacies of this use of the new medium. In this episode of the podcast, Fox-Amato discusses the ways these various groups used photography for individual purposes and to shape the debates surrounding slavery in the antebellum period. He explains how photographs also highlight how union soldiers were beginning to think about a post-slavery racial hierarchy during the war. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about photographs as both visual images and material objects. In the interview, Fox-Amato discusses the research necessary to analyze the photographs in both these ways and the broader importance of studying visual and material culture in all their historical complexity. Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected].

What does a typical American Catholic parish look like? Tricia Bruce, an affiliate of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society, argues in her new book that America’s largest denomination is held together by the differences it contains. Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church, published by Oxford University Press (2017), offers an outstanding account of how ecclesiastical structures have changed to take account of the tensions that can exist when “mobile people encounter immobile infrastructure.” Existing alongside the more familiar territorial and national parish structures, personal parishes allow believers with similar ethnic, linguistic, political or liturgical preferences to gather together. But does this represent a concession to the congregational impulse of American Protestantism, or to the market created by religious competition? Are personal parishes a symbol of the success or failure of American Catholicism? Do they represent new forms of segregation, and do they allow the hierarchy to control dissent? Tricia Bruce’s Parish and Place offers a distinctive and compelling analysis of the structures that may determine the future of the American Catholic church. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

The US government is laboring under an enormous debt burden, one that will impact the living standards of future generations of Americans by limiting investment in people and infrastructure. In his new book, Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future (Oxford University Press, 2019), Brookings Institution senior scholar William Gale tackles the challenge head on, addressing what needs to happen to healthcare spending, Social Security, individual taxes, and corporate taxes, in order to make the numbers add up. It makes for sober reading, and the longer we wait, the worse the situation becomes. And the key challenge may not even be fiscal, but political, as the disagreements in Washington over the debt are as deep as the debt is large. Gale ends by making a few simple, inside-Washington suggestions as to how he thinks the political impasse can be broken. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

Though she died in 1847 at a young age, Marie Duplessis inspired one of the greatest operas ever composed. In The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis (Oxford University Press, 2015), René Weis recounts the life of the remarkable woman who overcame poverty and abuse to become the toast of Parisian society. Born Alphonsine Plessis, as a young girl she was sexually assaulted by her own father before she escaped to Paris. Initially finding work as a laundress, Duplessis’s beauty soon won her the attention of wealthy admirers, whose interests gave her access to the social elite. As Weis demonstrates, her success as a courtesan was not just because of her physical attractiveness, but also due to her intelligence, her charm, and her generous spirit, all of which won her a range of friends and lovers that included some of the greatest artistic talents of her time. Among them was the younger Alexandre Dumas, whose novel La Dame aux Camélias was based on Duplessis’s life and which, in turn, inspired the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi to write La traviata, an opera which has enchanted and entertained millions ever since its initial performance in 1853.

Since 2011, civil wars and state failure have wracked the Arab world, underlying the misalignment between national identity and political borders. In Break all the Borders: Separatism and the Resshaping of the Middle East (Oxford UP, 2019), Ariel I. Ahram examines the separatist movements that aimed to remake those borders and create new independent states. With detailed studies of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the federalists in eastern Libya, the southern resistance in Yemen, and Kurdish nationalist parties, Ahram explains how separatists captured territory and handled the tasks of rebel governance, including managing oil exports, electricity grids, and irrigation networks. Ahram emphasizes that the separatism arose not just as an opportunistic response to state collapse. Rather, separatists drew inspiration from the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and ideal of self-determination. They sought to reinstate political autonomy that had been lost during the early and mid-twentieth century. Speaking to the international community, separatist promised a more just and stable world order. In Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya, they served as key allies against radical Islamic groups. Yet their hopes for international recognition have gone unfulfilled. Separatism is symptomatic of the contradictions in sovereignty and statehood in the Arab world. Finding ways to integrate, instead of eliminate, separatist movements may be critical for rebuilding regional order.

In recent years, the concept of a ‘Cold War’ has been revived to describe the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two most influential states occupying positions of geopolitical importance in the Persian Gulf, who lay claim to leadership over the Islamic world. In the years after the 1979 revolution in Iran, the two states became embroiled in a rivalry that risked consuming the region, dividing it along religious lines. Although latent for a good number of years, the rivalry has erupted in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, since the Second Gulf War. With devastating consequences in the region as a whole. As a consequence of its escalation, a number of scholars have begun to explore this increasingly fractious rivalry. The latest piece of work has been undertaken by the prolific Indian émigré journalist Dilip Hiro, a long-time expert on Near & Middle East politics and the author of a large number of books and opinion pieces on the topic, among others. In Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Hiro offers an analysis of the cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, exploring their interaction since the turn of the twentieth century. Spread across sixteen chapters. If one is looking for a well-written and convincing narrative of the rivalry, that demonstrates a solid awareness of history, then Hiro’s book is for you. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

Dr. Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural historian of early South Asia specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is Associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has worked extensively on Sanskrit kavya, a genre of highly aesthetic poetry and prose. She is the author of The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India (Permanent Black and Seagull Books, 2010), and has edited Cultural History of Early South Asia: A Reader (Orient BlackSwan, 2013). The interview is about her second and recent book The Making of Early Kashmir, in which she upturns many prevalent views about the cultural history of Kashmir. As many would know, Kashmir is right now a highly contested territory within India, and as it happens with all such spaces, there is equally a contestation over the reconstruction of the historical memory related to the land. In this book, Shonaleeka Kaul challenges the view that Kashmir had an isolated, insular and unique regional and cultural identity, separate from the identity of mainstream India. She argues that it was in fact the opposite, and her argument is based on, among other things, her highly original reading of the Sanskrit kavya, Rajtarangini, composed by the Kashmiri author Kalhana in the 12th century AD.

Non-human animals are companions, research subjects, creatures we fear, creatures we eat. Why do we put other animals in the various categories we do, and treat them in the various good and bad ways that we do? These are questions about human attitudes towards other animals, and the moral implications of those attitudes. In Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes Towards Animals (Oxford University Press, 2018), T. J. Kasperbauer examines this relatively underexplored area of moral psychology. Kasperbauer, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Bioethics and the Indiana University School of Medicine, argues that we dehumanize animals in a particular way to ensure their status as inferior outgroups, and that our ability to improve moral outcomes is limited by our psychology. But knowing what these psychological limits are is crucial for understanding how moral behavior towards animals can be improved.

In Enemy Number One: The United States of American in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Rósa Magnúsdóttir of Aarhus University, explores depictions of America in post-war Soviet propaganda. While the 1945 “meeting on the Elbe” marked a high point in United States/Soviet friendship, official relations deteriorated quickly thereafter. Enemy Number One incorporates a wide range of source material such as letters by Soviet citizens, popular magazines, Voice of America broadcasts, and a wide range of secondary scholarly literatures. Among the author’s conclusions based on this body of evidence, are that Russian state propaganda differentiated between “good” and “bad” Americans, that state propaganda to the contrary, everyday people in the USSR never lost a sense that WWII had been the site of genuine friendship between Americans and Soviet citizens, and, intriguingly, that Soviet propaganda could have been far more effective in the United State than it in fact was. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

Epistemologists working traditional modes have sought to discover the necessary and sufficient conditions under which one has knowledge. This has led to several tricky philosophical problems. Perhaps most notorious of these are the problems concerning skepticism. It seems that any analysis of knowledge admits of cases where the analysis is satisfied and yet knowledge has not been secured. This has led some philosophers to seek some other starting point for epistemology. Perhaps one should begin with the anti-skeptical premise that there are clear cases of knowledge, and then attempt from there to provide analyses of its constituent elements – belief, justification, evidence, and so on. Alas, this approach also has invited difficulties. In What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2019), Michael Hannon takes a different approach. He argues that the place to begin in epistemology is with the question of the function of knowledge. Or, more precisely, he proposes to begin with an examination of the function of the concept of knowledge, the purpose for the sake of which we evaluate others as knowers. The result is a “function-first” epistemology.

Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr., in his new book, Reading Politics with Machiavelli(Oxford University Press, 2018), puts himself and the reader into conversation with Machiavelli, exploring Machiavelli’s thinking and how Machiavelli explains his theories. As Schmidt notes, Machiavelli put himself into non-temporal conversations with ancient and classical thinkers, with religious texts and understandings, and with a raft of historical and contemporary political examples and experiences. These encounters provide the opportunity to reconsider democratic institutions and, more importantly for Schmidt’s analysis, an expansion of the democratic imagination. Part of the critique of our current political imagination is that it is circumscribed by a neoliberal narrowness. In order to think through solutions to political problems, Schmidt engages Machiavelli’s many works, finding within those works two things: potential solutions to contemporary political problems, but perhaps more importantly, new ways to think about the problems themselves and the possible solutions. This is the more profound interpretation within Reading Politics with Machiavelli, that Niccolo Machiavelli, in the intimate mode of his writing, and in the engaging way he structures and integrates his examples and what we should learn from those examples and analyses, is providing contemporary readers with innovative and imaginative approaches to think about politics.

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspense through Baker’s performances, personal journals, museums, architectural designs, and the lyrics of Cole Porter--to name a few--Cheng draws on the oft-studied but little considered Josephine Baker as a figure of articulation for the nuanced contradictions of primitivism, modernism, and theory. Through Baker, Cheng invites us to reconsider the mutual imbrication of object/subject, surface/depth, and exploitation/fascination. Cheng’s careful eye and beautiful command of texture illustrates that dissolving Baker into pure particularity--into pure surface--is the best way to capture her unique agency.

Transnational feminist theory and practice is faced with a dilemma: how should we contest and resist gender-based oppression, while at the same time respecting cultural difference? In her book, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic(Oxford University Press, 2018), Serene J. Khader argues for a way out of this universalism/relativist impasse. She proposes a “nonideal universalism,” arguing that while feminism requires a universalist opposition to sexist oppression, it need not require universal adoption of Western values and strategies. Nonideal universalism answers the dilemma by rejecting the view that there is a single cultural form compatible with feminism, and by focusing on justice enhancement rather than justice achievement. Ultimately, Khader argues that transnational feminist solidarity requires empirical, contextual consideration of the harms of sexist oppression against the harms of imperialist intervention. Emily K. Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

The history of Indian religions in the centuries leading up to the common era has been characterized in the scholarship by two distinct overarching traditions: the Brahmans (associated with Vedic texts, caste, and Vedic rituals) and the renouncer (śramaṇa) movements we see in the Upanishads, and in Jainism and Buddhism. Were these traditions at odds with each other as “snake and mongoose” (attributed to the 2nd-century BCE Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali)? Does “Brahmanism” pre-exist this pivotal encounter, or as it in fact forged therefrom? Was there such a thing, e.g., as a Buddhist Brahman in this era? In his book The Snake and The Mongoose: The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018), Nathan McGovern draws on ancient texts to problematize the distinction between Brahman and non-Brahman in this era, shedding light on the presence of various Buddhist, Jain and Vedic groups who equally identified as Brahmans.

Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedented in form and extent, and new socioeconomic structures, including slavery, coinage, and market-exchange. These physical and historical developments were closely linked: building the Republican city was expensive, and meeting such costs had significant implications for urban society. Building Mid-Republican Rome brings both architectural and socioeconomic developments into a single account of urban change. Seth Bernard, an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, assembles a wide array of evidence, from literary sources to coins, epigraphy, and especially archaeological remains, revealing the period's importance for the decline of the Roman state's reliance on obligation and dependency and the rise of slavery and an urban labor market. This narrative is told through an investigation of the evolving institutional frameworks shaping the organization of public construction. A quantitative model of the costs of the Republican city walls reconstructs their economic impact. A new account of building technology in the period allows for a better understanding of the social and demographic profile of the city's builders. Building Mid-Republican Rome thus provides an innovative synthesis of a major Western city's spatial and historical aspects, shedding much-needed light on a seminal period in Rome's development. Ryan Tripp teaches history in California.

What does it mean to consider trauma and media from the perspective of technology and not from that of the subject of trauma, the clinician or the witness? In Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford University Press, 2019), Amit Pinchevski carries out this thought experiment to great effect. By bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, this book reveals the technical operations that inform the understanding of traumatic impact on bodies and minds. Under consideration is not the way trauma and traumatic memory figure in the media (film, television, photography and other popular culture portrayals of traumatic experience), but rather media as partaking in the very construction of the traumatic itself. Pinchevski conducts an erudite and innovative exploration through a series of case studies: the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD. Each of these cases makes a compelling argument about how media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Transmitted Wounds takes us from mid-twentieth century to our current moment, moving us from an analogue world of trauma to the digital ecosystem that promises to transcend trauma all together. This temporal set-up demands ethical considerations of past and current systems of memory, witnessing and therapy, which Pinchevski does exceptionally well. Transmitted Wounds offers fresh and thought-provoking contributions to the fields of trauma and memory, media theory, and the history of science and technology. It will also be of relevance to theoreticians and practitioners interested in digital culture and digital humanities. Amit Pinchevski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (Duquesne University Press 2005) and coeditor of two books, Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Ethics of Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His research interests are in philosophy and theory of communication and media. Tal Zalmanovich is a cultural historian of modern Britain. She’s a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at [email protected]

Human brains have two hemispheres whose major connection is the corpus callosum, which enables information to be shared between the hemispheres. Split-brain subjects are people whose corpus callosum has been surgically cut to alleviate epilepsy. This and other similar operations or conditions yield an odd phenomenon in which the patient appears to be two agents: for example, in controlled experiments they may only be conscious of stimuli shown to just their right eye, but when asked to draw the stimulus with the left hand they draw the stimulus shown to just their left eye. It is as if each hemisphere is its own self, with its own eye. In Self-Consciousness and Split Brains: The Mind's I (Oxford University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Schechter argues that while split brain subjects have two minds and two subjective perspectives, and are two intentional agents, they nevertheless constitute one person. Schechter, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, offers an in-depth exploration of the neuroscience and psychology of split brains and their implications for our understanding of minds, selves, agents and persons.

What accounts for the antagonism between Christianity and Darwinism? For Michael Ruse, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, the answer is simple: Darwinism is not just a robust empirical science, but also a secular religious perspective—hence, a clear rival to Christianity. In The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict(Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruse provides a concise intellectual history of that rivalry as it played out in their multifaceted and conflicting responses to war. With wide-ranging erudition, analytical acuity, and passionate moral engagement, Ruse surveys Christian thinking about war from Augustine to Barth and beyond, and Darwinian views from Darwin himself to Steven Pinker and Franz de Waal. Highlighting the ways in these which these traditions have evolved over the course of the 20th century, Ruse shows how their interaction has become increasingly complicated, making any simple narrative of straightforward antagonism inadequate. With the problem of war as pressing as ever, The Problem of War helps us better understand how both secular and religious attitudes towards war fundamentally reflect our conceptions of human nature and value, and offers a way for Christian and Darwinian perspectives to potentially find common ground.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a sweeping examination of the key ideas that have infused American society. Moving across borders, time, and within American culture the author gives a well-written and spirited account of why ideas matter. Beginning with how the name “America” came to be in the mind of European empires in the sixteenth century, to the end of the twentieth century when globalization, another form of empire, was on the minds of Americans. Along the way Ratner-Rosenhagen, offers a tour through early European contact with native people, the American Enlightenment, the romance with the new republic, the remaking of the nation through the transcendentalist movement, scientific discoveries, pragmatism and modernism to the intellectual, social and political ruptures of the late twentieth centuries that owe a great deal to what came before. This bird’s eye view captures the significance of attending to ideas that motivated Americans to different forms of action and engagement— A great book for those unfamiliar with the intellectual history of America and for those wanting to connect different streams of that history. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti Associate Professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her recent book is The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018).

On this episode of New Books in Communications, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Bradford Vivian (he/his) of Penn State University on his fabulous new book Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). In this book, Dr. Vivian asks readers to reconsider our almost sacred regard for the act of witnessing in public culture and consider witnessing as a rhetorical act that we recognize not only because of the transparent truth of the witness testimony but because that testimony conforms to particular expectations of witnessing, which Dr. Vivian calls the “topoi” or commonplaces of witnessing including authenticity, impossibility, and regret. Investigating a variety of public culture texts—from 19th-century speeches to the 9/11 Memorial—Dr. Vivian explores the ambiguity of witnessing as an act of memory and culture and how that act normalizes who has the right to speak truth and how.

Matthew Bingham, who teaches theology and church history at Oak Hill College, London, has written what must be one of the most startling accounts of religion in mid-seventeenth-century England. His new book, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019), argues against several centuries of historical interpretation of the new religious movement that emerged in London in the late 1630s and now numbers around 35 million adherents worldwide. Matt’s argument is that – during the English revolution, at least – there was no such thing as “Baptists,” and that historians who have used that term as a tool to investigate religion within this period unwittingly replicate the assumptions of later denominational polemicists. Orthodox radicals is a bold and compelling argument about the power of labels, and the necessity of our understanding our subjects on their own terms. The churches that became known as Baptists existed for three generations without any denominational label. Matt’s powerful new book shows how little we understand the new religious movements of early modern England when we rush towards classification. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Jonathan Edwards is by now widely recognised as America’s most important early philosopher and theologian. Much of the scholarship that exegetes his work is content to see it as something innovative, and closely linked to the emerging contexts of enlightenment. But how much did Edwards also depend upon earlier European Reformed sources? In this important new book, Adriaan Neele, a research fellow of the Yale Jonathan Edwards Centre and professor of historical theology at Puritan Reformed Theolgical Seminary in Grand Rapids, explores the world of post-Reformation dogmatics and its influence upon America’s greatest theologian. Before Jonathan Edwards: Sources of New England Theology (Oxford UP, 2019) offers important new arguments about the character of Reformed dogmatics and about their importance to Edwards’ thinking about preaching, exegesis, theology and history. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Studies of Hindu saints tend to focus primarily on the saints themselves—their words, teachings, and practices—rather than tending to the often complex and complicated world of texts and traditions about those saints—which is how we have come to know them. Even when hagiographical writings are addressed, more often than not such writings are presumed to belong to a monolithic tradition in which certain texts simply contain more information or stories about the saints than others. In Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford University Press, 2018), Gil Ben-Herut, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, challenges such presumptions through his close examination of the text and contexts of the 12th-century Vīraśaiva hagiographical text Ragaḷegaḷu written in Kannada by Harihara. Providing theoretical insight into notions of sainthood itself as well as the politics of commemoration and the contentious worlds of ever-changing religious and other social identity formations, Śiva’s Saints examines the multiple goals of hagiographical literature like the Ragaḷegaḷu as well as how this text complicates our understandings of what Vīraśaivas today are most well-known for—their bhakti or inner devotion to Siva, their egalitarianism, and their challenging of Brahmanical norms. In doing so, Ben-Herut reveals significant nuances of the social worlds in which Harihara was embedded and to which his Ragaḷegaḷu is responding, most especially who Harihara casts as distinct but familial “others” versus those intimate “others” he agues should be kept out of the community. Through rigorous analysis and sensitivity to context, Śiva’s Saints demonstrates how close attention to the writings about saints can reveal the complex inner and outer workings of religious groups within specific historical social contexts. Dean Accardi is an Assistant Professor of History at Connecticut College. His work focuses on gender, religion, and politics in early modern Kashmir and how saints and sultans of that period continue to be invoked today in contestations over Kashmir’s social, cultural, religious, and political belonging. You can find out more about him and his work at his website or email him at [email protected].

Back on the podcast for the second time in two years is Alex Hertel-Fernandez. You might recall his last book Politics at Work which examined the way employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy. Alex is back with his latest, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States--and the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. In State Capture, Hertel-Fernandez focuses on the development and political power of three inter-locking interest groups: the Koch Brothers-run Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the State Policy Network (SPN). Drawing from an array of sources of data, Hertel-Fernandez shows how, since the 1970s, conservative policy entrepreneurs, large financial contributors, and major corporations built a right-wing "troika" of overlapping and influential lobbying group.

The study of Islam is often focused on subjects involved in legal debates or ritual practice. But our understanding of Muslims should also be informed by everyday practices found in the suburbs. In Suburban Islam (Oxford University Press, 2018), Justine Howe, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University, examines the social and spiritual contexts of Muslims living outside of Chicago. Her study focuses on a “third space” for American Islam, a community space called the Webb Foundation, and its membership. Muslim identity for many Webb members is shaped by shared ideals about consumer culture, leisure activities, parenting, and the construction of family life. The fluid and open nature of the community provides room for debate and discussion about gendered practices, racial and ethnic divisions within the Muslim community, or religious pluralism. In the growing body of scholarship on Muslims in America Suburban Islam adds a unique vantage point that greatly adds to our overall vision of the community within American religious history. In our conversation we discussed the history of Islam in Chicago, female authority, pluralism in the Qur’an, consumerist practices, the public celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, adult educational programming, book groups, jurisprudence classes, religious devotion, and American Muslim suburban culture. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].

It seems to go against evolutionary theory for an individual to give up its own chances at reproducing in order to increase the fitness of others. Yet social behavior is found throughout nature, from bacteria and social insects to wolves, whales, and of course humans. What makes self-sacrifice to any degree even possible, given that self-interested behavior is the default? In The Philosophy of Social Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jonathan Birch critically examines the conceptual foundations of social evolution theory, considering debates about kin vs. group selection, cultural as well as genetic transmissible bases of inheritance, and inclusive vs. neighbor-modulated fitness. Birch, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, also discusses the view of multicellular organisms as societies of cells, and extends the concept of genetic relatedness to cultural relatedness by means of common cultural traits.

The Macedonian king Alexander III is best remembered today for his many martial accomplishments and the empire he built from them. Yet as Fred S. Naiden details in Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life of Alexander the Great (Oxford University Press, 2018), this ignores what for his subjects were his even more important responsibilities as a religious figure. Alexander’s religious practices were a vital part of his legitimacy as a ruler of his people, and were interwoven into his daily activities. As his armies advanced into southwestern Asia, Alexander insinuated himself into the religions of the lands he conquered, which aided the acceptance of his rule. This became increasingly difficult the further east he marched, however, as the religious systems he encountered there often contained obligations often at variance from the traditions which he had accepted. As Naiden describes, Alexander’s increasing disregard for the religions he encountered contributed to the difficulties he faced with his later campaigns, fueling both local resistance and rebellions by his own men.

The story of Emmett Till’s death at the hands of white Mississippians is well known. For many Americans, it highlights the racism of the Jim Crow South and was a defining moment that helped galvanize a generation of civil rights leaders. In his new book, Elliott J. Gorn (Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago) tells the story of Till’s life and death. The death and trial was a national and international news story, but the exact meaning of events in Mississippi were contested. Moreover, the horrific images of Till’s badly beaten body were published in black publications at a time of a segregated media landscape. Most white Americans did not see them until decades later. In Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till (Oxford University Press, 2018), Gorn also tells this story of the story of Till’s death—examining how responses to the death varied across the population and showing how public memory of Till’s murder has changed over the intervening years. In this episode of the podcast, Gorn discusses Till’s life, death, and legacy. He explains what happened and how it was received at the time. He also discusses why Till’s death drew so much attention, and how that attention fit into the larger historical context. He touches on why his death feels especially timely today. Finally, he discusses the experience of researching the book. Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected].

Earlier today I caught up with my colleague at Queen’s University Belfast, Andrew R. Holmes, to discuss his outstanding new book, The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830-1930 (Oxford UP, 2018). Andrew has been working on the history of Irish Presbyterianism for the last fifteen years or so, and along the way has produced some of the most exciting work on the history of evangelicalism in Britain and Ireland. His distinctive vantage point allows Andrew to make compelling and original arguments about culture, community and criticism in the long nineteenth century. In his latest book, Andrew surveys the period in which Irish Presbyterians came together as a community, to debate different ways of being conservative, and to deal with tensions that arose between their increasingly conflicting commitments to the Westminster Confession, their statement of faith, and the new emphasis upon experience that was being promoted in trans-Atlantic evangelicalism. It was evangelical ideas that both pulled Irish Presbyterians together and at the end of the century pushed them apart. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Even those among us who think that morality is rooted in timeless normative truths will acknowledge that the overall moral fabric that binds us to one another is subject to various kinds of renovation and expansion. To take a simplistic example, the advent of the Internet has occasioned a host of new moral concepts attuned to the new ways in which people are able to treat each other -- think of “friending,” “blocking,” trolling, “sub-tweeting,” doxing, and such. These are new concepts introduced into the moral vernacular for the sake of identifying novel kinds of moral behavior. That our moral vernacular expands in these ways is obvious enough. But there’s a distinct question concerning how more innovations become authoritative – that is, how new moral concepts come to bind us in that distinctive way that morality is binding. In Articulating the Moral Community: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2018), Henry S. Richardson develops a fascinating account of how new, authoritative moral norms can be introduced. The book treats core topics in metaethics, moral psychology, and the theory of practical reasoning.

Hidetaka Hirota is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to his current position, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and taught at the City University of New York-City College. Dr. Hirota’s book, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018) has received awards from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the New England American Studies Association, and the American Conference for Irish Studies, and Dr. Hirota’s book also received a special commendation for the Massachusetts Historical Society book prize. Dr. Hirota’s book focuses on state legislation policies of immigration control in New York and Massachusetts. Dr. Hirota asserts those laws come to act as a framework for subsequent federal policy. While most American Studies scholars have mostly aligned with the dominant theory that our nation had open borders prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Hirota’s research reveals that prior to the 1880s laws of exclusion and deportation were used to to rid communities of the poor and infirm. "Hidetaka Hirota's Expelling the Poor is an exceptional, deeply researched, and timely study that transforms our understanding of U.S. immigration history and of Irish American studies. Shockingly, Hirota demonstrates that in the mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts and New York officials, inspired by nativism, anti-Catholicism, and what would now be called neoliberalism, excluded and/or deported roughly 100,000 would-be immigrants to the United States: mostly Irish paupers, many of them helpless widows and orphans, often expelled in the cruelest and most autocratic manner. As Hirota also shows, these vicious state policies were later adopted on the federal level, and, indeed, they are implemented today against the immigrants and refugees that US economic and foreign policies have uprooted from their homes."​--Kerby A. Miller, author of ​Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America.

While William Penn’s name is one familiar to many Americans thanks to his founding of the Pennsylvania colony, this accomplishment can overshadow both his role as a leading 17th-century English Quaker and his pioneering contributions to Western political thought. In William Penn: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2018), Andrew R. Murphy recounts the range of Penn’s achievements and the many obstacles he overcame in the process. The son of a Royal Navy officer, Penn spent many of his early years in a restless search for personal fulfillment. This he found when he turned to Quakerism, his conversion to which set him at odds with the dominant Anglican faith. Penn’s preaching and his campaigns against the state’s intolerance of religious dissent both fueled his status as one of the most prominent members of England’s Quaker community and led him to be jailed several times. Though he viewed Pennsylvania as a haven for Quakers, the many challenges of establishing a colony in North America both limited Penn’s time in the New World and left him with enormous debts that he spent his final years working to resolve.

Onur Ulas Ince constructs an important analysis of liberalism, capitalism, and empire in his new book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). This text brings together a number of lenses through which to consider the writings and ideas of British liberal thinkers, especially John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This book—which is part of a larger project that will contain another book paying attention to Adam Smith, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and others—focuses on the political thought, socioeconomic context, and the cultural understanding of British empire, the growth of capitalism, and the rise of Anglo-liberal thought. This extremely clear and beautifully written book links together a variety of methodological approaches to consider these often-distinct areas within political thought, economic thought, cultural studies, and theories of empire. Ince explores this analysis through the triad of private property, market exchange, and free labor, especially as these components became the structure of the British colonial undertakings across continents, countries, and people, while also being integrated into the foundation of liberal political theory.