In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

On November 11, 2015, leaders and citizens of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy–Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora–will gather in the small lakeside city of Canandaigua, New York to commemorate the 221st anniversary of a monumental treaty. Negotiated between the Confederacy and representatives of new federal government in the autumn of 1794, the Treaty of Canandaigua recognized the sovereign status of the Six Nations as separate polities with the right to the “free use and enjoyment” of their lands. While state and private actors would soon violate the accord, seizing ever more Haudenosaunee territory, the Canandaigua Treaty remains a binding expression of “peace and friendship” between the the Confederacy (commonly known as the Iroquois) and the United States. Michael L. Oberg tells this remarkable story of intercultural diplomacy in Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (Oxford University Press, 2015). Distinguished Professor of History at SUNY-Geneseo, Oberg narrates the twists and turns of war, dispossession, and resilience that brought sixteen hundred Haudenosaunee delegates, including Red Jacket, Cornplanter, and Handsome Lake, to a council with Colonel Timothy Pickering, an official representative of President George Washington. “Brother, we the Sachems of the Six Nations will now tell our minds,” Red Jacket declared in 1794. “The business of this treaty is to brighten the Chain of Friendship between us and the fifteen fires.” The Haudenosaunee continue that effort today.

Buddhaghosa, a fifth-century Pali Buddhist scholar or group of scholars, is the most influential commentator in Theravada Buddhist tradition, who has in many respects created the set of ideas we now associate with Theravada Buddhism today. Maria Heim‘s new The Forerunner of All Things (Oxford University Press, 2013) is one of the few books to explore Buddhaghosa’s extremely wide corpus of work on a whole. She focuses on the theme of intention (cetana) to explore how Buddhaghosa articulates a moral psychology very different from modern Western conceptions of ethics that focus on individual choices and decisions. The book is an important work for philosophers in moral psychology as well as students of Theravada.

In Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), Aaron W. Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester, explores that paradox he sees at the heart of Jewish philosophy. He looks at canonical Jewish philosophers like Maimonides and Rosenzweig, but also Solomon ibn Gabirol and Judah Abravanel to depict Jewish philosophy from a different perspective. Hughes suggests a possible way forward to Jewish thought if we, and the academy, embrace the idea of Jewish theology.

Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there indeed is some one thing that she ought to do. And if she were indeed to do this thing, she would thereby morally succeed. But we know from experience that our moral lives involve moral dilemmas. These are cases in which it seems that moral success is not possible because every action available to us is morally wrong, even unacceptable. In such cases, morality requires what is impossible: no matter what one does, one acts as one ought not to act. In Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lisa Tessman proposes an original account of impossible moral demands, and forcefully argues for an approach to moral theory that can recognize their normative authority.

The assassination of the Armenian-Turkish activist Hrant Dink in 2007 raised uncomfortable questions about a historical tragedy that the leaders of the Turkish Republic would like people to forget: the Armenian genocide. In his new book Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide (Oxford UP, 2015), the journalist/historian Vicken Cheterian offers a scholarly, yet high readable account of this injustice and the century-long silence surrounding it. With engaging prose, he explains how and why this genocide took place, including a description of the violence that Kurds carried out against Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also helps readers better grasp the continuities in how Sultan Abudhamid II, the Young Turks, and Mustafa Kamal’s Turkish Republic employed violence to deal with their “Armenian problem” and other “internal enemies” such as Greeks, Assyrians, and the Yezidis. Not one to mince words, Cheterian offers a fascinating description of the Turkish efforts to delegitimize Armenian identities and silence international discussion of the genocide. He also reveals the complexities of how Armenians across the globe, including those of Armenian descent in Turkey, have struggled to raise international awareness about the genocide and make contemporary Turkish leaders confront the past. Just as important, he gives readers a “human feel” for the suffering of the Armenians by delving into the complexities of historical memory and the issue of “forced conversions.” He also takes readers on a guided tour of the Middle East that makes reference to architecture and landmarks to illustrate just how far the Turks have gone to erase historical memories of Armenians. The continuing debates about the appropriateness of using the term “genocide” to describe the Turkish treatment of the Armenians should not overshadow Cheterian’s accomplishments. He makes a strong case that Turks will not build a genuine democracy until their leaders begin to confront the past in honest ways and stop tolerating their “deep state’s” ongoing war against Armenians. The recent cracks in the global silence on the Armenian genocide raise an important question: Just how much will the increased willingness of Turks to identify with their Armenian heritage and speak about the genocide influence Turkish foreign policy and domestic development in the years ahead?

The assassination of the Armenian-Turkish activist Hrant Dink in 2007 raised uncomfortable questions about a historical tragedy that the leaders of the Turkish Republic would like people to forget: the Armenian genocide. In his new book Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide (Oxford UP, 2015), the journalist/historian Vicken Cheterian offers a scholarly, yet high readable account of this injustice and the century-long silence surrounding it. With engaging prose, he explains how and why this genocide took place, including a description of the violence that Kurds carried out against Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also helps readers better grasp the continuities in how Sultan Abudhamid II, the Young Turks, and Mustafa Kamal's Turkish Republic employed violence to deal with their "Armenian problem" and other "internal enemies" such as Greeks, Assyrians, and the Yezidis. Not one to mince words, Cheterian offers a fascinating description of the Turkish efforts to delegitimize Armenian identities and silence international discussion of the genocide. He also reveals the complexities of how Armenians across the globe, including those of Armenian descent in Turkey, have struggled to raise international awareness about the genocide and make contemporary Turkish leaders confront the past. Just as important, he gives readers a "human feel" for the suffering of the Armenians by delving into the complexities of historical memory and the issue of "forced conversions." He also takes readers on a guided tour of the Middle East that makes reference to architecture and landmarks to illustrate just how far the Turks have gone to erase historical memories of Armenians. The continuing debates about the appropriateness of using the term "genocide" to describe the Turkish treatment of the Armenians should not overshadow Cheterian's accomplishments. He makes a strong case that Turks will not build a genuine democracy until their leaders begin to confront the past in honest ways and stop tolerating their "deep state's" ongoing war against Armenians. The recent cracks in the global silence on the Armenian genocide raise an important question: Just how much will the increased willingness of Turks to identify with their Armenian heritage and speak about the genocide influence Turkish foreign policy and domestic development in the years ahead?

What’s missing from our understanding of the role of dancers in the context of American Cultural Diplomacy? Clare Croft‘s first book, Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2015) provides a range of thoughtful, well-researched responses to this question. By exploring the ways in which dancer’s bodies were operationalized and “deployed” on behalf of the US State Department during the Cold War as well as at the dawn of the 21st century, Dancers as Diplomats centers the work of dancers and choreographers as ambassadors, provocateurs and global leaders. Including more than 70 interviews with dancers who traveled on these international tours, the book centers the voices of artists actively engaged in this very particular kind of cultural work. Clare Croft is a historian, theorist, and dramaturg, working at the intersection of dance studies and performance studies. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American dance, cultural policy, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory. Professor Croft holds a PhD in theatre history and criticism with an emphasis in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas-Austin and an MA in performance studies from New York University. Dr. Croft is Assistant Professor of Dance in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance at the University of Michigan.

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (Oxford University Press, 2015) is the latest book by Sanjay Srivastava. A wonderfully readable piece of urban anthropology, the book explores the ways spaces and processes are interconnected in the city. From temples that resemble shopping malls, through the gates of luxury apartments and into the electricity supply networks of slums, the book pulls together the threads that entangle city dwellers with one another.

“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus of the Fifth Republic’s first two decades. What made certain sounds “French,” and how did different cultural communities come together, expressing themselves in a variety of musical forms? From Francoise Hardy to Serge Gainsbourg, to the sounds of free jazz, Brittany folk, and punk, the book considers French musical production and consumption in global cultural context. Exploring the relationship between audio and national identities and communities, Briggs tracks both the influences from outside France on a range of scenes in and beyond Paris, and the reach of “French” sounds beyond the nation’s borders. Sounds French is a book that examines the contributions of artists and listeners, reading “the noise” of (and surrounding) the music treated in its pages. The book also includes links to some of the songs that Briggs writes about (see the companion website developed by OUP). Fans of yé-yé, Johnny Hallyday, chanson, Jean-Michel Jarre, Alain Stivell, Metal Urbain, and/or Daft Punk will all find much to learn and enjoy here.

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is an assistant professor of new media at Fordham University. Baldwin-Philippi’s book fits into a larger Oxford series on Digital Politics which has been featured on the podcast in the past. She uses an ethnographic approach focused on understanding how political campaigns in 2010 had incorporated various technologies. She also collects original data on specific digital strategies, especially social media. But the book is not just about technology; Baldwin-Philippi tries to understand how campaigns shape citizenship and democracy through the tools they use.

Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms of emerging fora for academic publications. In Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2015), Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee bring together a range of authors to outline a new research programme. Alongside individual essays that range from the allocation of transplant organs, questions of plagiarism in science, the ownership of generically modified organisms though to desire and neuroscience, the book points to a new way to think through questions of valuation. As a result its importance moves beyond an STS audience to establish value practices as a vital framework for understanding contemporary life.

What does non-religion mean? In a new book Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lois Lee, one of the editors of Secularism and Non-Religion, interrogates the role of non-religion in society, to better understand how a seemingly neutral category tells us much about the contemporary world. Positioning the research against narratives that claim society as secularized, or as increasingly post-secular, Lee’s work, along with other scholars in the Non-Religion and Secularity Research Network, shows how there are varieties of secularism and non-religion prevailing today. The book is programatic, setting out a framework for engaging with non-religion as a bodily practice, as sociality, as media and as the everyday. Moreover it offers a methodological challenge to traditions of survey research in this area. In the final chapter the book also sketches the concept of existential cultures, showing the points of intersection in the practices of the secular and non-religious, with the theistic and spiritual. The book, because it reframes our understanding of modernity itself, should be essential reading across the social sciences.

What are some of the key features and characteristics of the Muslim feminist Qur’an exegetical tradition and what are some of the tensions and ambiguities found in that tradition? Those are the central questions addressed by Aysha Hidayatullah, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at the University of San Francisco, in her path clearing new book, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an (Oxford University Press, 2014). In this shining book, Hidayatullah presents a detailed and nuanced explanation of the varied paradigms of Muslim feminist Qur’an exegeses, primarily though not exclusively focusing on the work of scholars in the US. She also considers and highlights some of the limitations of such feminist exegetical projects, concluding that perhaps patriarchal readings of the Qur’an cannot be entirely or conclusively dismissed as impossible. In this book, Hidayatullah seamlessly and brilliantly combines intellectual history, discursive analysis, and critical theological reflections. Written with exemplary clarity, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an introduces non-specialists to the fascinating yet complicated terrain of feminist and indeed modernist Qur’an exegesis while offering specialists more familiar with this terrain groundbreaking conceptual interventions and new avenues of thought and research. This incredibly lucid book should also work splendidly in undergraduate and graduate courses on the Qur’an, gender, feminist thought, Muslim modernism, and Islam in America.

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection.

At 2,300 pages and featuring 54 contributors and 42 contextual and interpretive essays, the second edition of The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2014) represents a monumental scholarly achievement. In my conversation with coeditor Marc Zvi Brettler, he talks about the complexity of that undertaking and the foundations upon which it was built. Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Chair of Judaic Studies at Duke University’s Center for Jewish Studies. From 1986 to 2015, he taught Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and since 2001 was the Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies. His academic research has been wide ranging. He has explored the use of religious metaphors in the Hebrew Bible (God Is King: Understanding an Israelite Metaphor, 1989), the nature of biblical historical texts as “literary” texts (The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, 1995), and gender and the Bible. He was a co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament (2011) and The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2001 and 2010), the co-author of The Bible and the Believer (2012), the author of Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Hebrew (2002) and the co-editor of first edition of The Jewish Study Bible (2004), which was awarded a National Jewish Book Award. His book How to Read the Bible (2005) was published by the Jewish Publication Society and in paperback as How to Read the Jewish Bible (2007) by Oxford University Press. In addition to his published work, Brettler was awarded the Michael L. Walzer Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill’s view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty. In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom.

Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015). Per the books jacket, “Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange – a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself – along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money’s design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money’s creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. “Commodity money” was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half of the book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the first time with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown of commodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard – all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentives and public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money.” Some of the topics we cover are: * How the work’s assertion that money is a mode of governance in a material world undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality. * The “free minting” system and why legal enforcement was essential to it. * The radical redesign of money that began in the 17th century.

Professor James Gelvin joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the Arab Uprisings, democratization in the Middle-East and Northern Africa, ISIS, al-Qaeda, terrorism, and America’s role imposing neo-liberal economic policies in the Middle East that have strongly shaped the political economy of the region. James Gelvin is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is the revised and updated edition of The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012). If you want to be informed about what’s going on in the Middle East today, this short, easy-to-read book is the best work out there. For more information on James Gelvin, you can click here to visit his UCLA website.

Lisa Moses Leff joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss her new book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). In the aftermath of the Holocaust, wracked by grief and determined to facilitate the writing of an objective history of catastrophe, the historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered evidence of the persecution from Jewish leaders in Paris and from the wreckage of bombed-out buildings in Berlin. Many Jews in France and the United States saw his collecting of those papers as a heroic effort; however, in time, this “rescuer” became a thief. Most of the documents he acquired in the 1950s–mostly pertaining to Jewish history in France since the seventeenth century–he stole from the archives. After World War II ended, Szajkowski married and worked at YIVO (also known as the Jewish Scientific Institute), where his prickly personality and unorthodox methods now needed to be curbed, leading to a temporary split from the organization, during which he established himself as a leading scholar of French Jewry. But as he did, the once heroic collector of documents now became an archive thief. By 1949, there were suspicions of his misdeeds in the archives. Lisa Leff is a historian of Europe since 1789 whose research focuses on Jews in France. Her first book, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, examines the rise of Jewish international aid in 19th-century France. For more information on Dr. Leff, you can visit her American University webpage.

How can a practical philosophical perspective concerned with justice and fairness help us address the problem of climate change? Henry Shue (Merton College, Oxford) tackles this essential question in his book Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford UP, 2014). The book collects twenty-five years of Shue’s innovative work on climate justice into one rich and comprehensive volume. This conversation discusses the relation between climate justice and international inequality, justice between generations, alternative energy, how the science of climate change can inform philosophy, and more. The book is sure to be important for philosophers, scholars of human rights and international ethics, environmental studies and political theory, international institutions and global politics scholars, and other fields.

Kyle G. Volk is an associate professor of history at the University of Montana. His book Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2014) provides a compelling narrative of how nineteenth-century Americans negotiated the tension between majority rule and minority rights and between representative democracy and popular democracy. He focuses on debates in the antebellum northern states where moral reform efforts of Sabbatarians, temperance activist, and racial segregationists circumvented representative government to assert their social vision through direct majority rule. Volk shows how some Americans rejected majority reform projects of moral uplift as despotism. Non-elite minorities challenged the popular democracy initiatives that infringed on their constitutional rights to work on Sunday, sell and drink alcohol, and have access to integrated public transportation. Immigrants, blacks, abolitionists, liquor dealers, Catholics, Jews, Seventh-day Baptists, and others engaged in a proactive defense. They developed techniques to protect their rights through legal arguments, moral suasion of the press, and political action. The moral minorities of the nineteenth century bequeath the strategies for political and legal activism deployed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by ethnic minorities and gay rights advocates. Volk’s work illuminates our understanding of American democracy and minorities’ position within it.

Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, economics, and other sciences, although amid great controversy. The messy reality of biological creatures and their social relations cannot be captured in mathematical models or computer simulations, it is argued. But what is the relation between mathematics and physical reality? Do highly abstract mathematical formalisms and computer simulations yield empirical knowledge? If so, when, and how? In Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics and Simulations (Oxford University Press, 2015), Margaret Morrison, Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, considers the epistemological status of the results of modeling and simulation as compared, and typically contrasted with, the results of experiment. She argues that no sharp distinction between simulating the world and measuring the world can be drawn in modern science, and that there is no justification for epistemically privileging the results of experiments over the new knowledge we derive from idealizations, abstractions, and fictional models.

Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox are the authors of Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned off to Politics (Oxford UP,2015). Lawless is a Professor of Government and the Director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. Fox is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University. The two conducted surveys of over 4,000 younger Americans. What they find is that their young Americans rarely think, talk or consider politics. While many seem to care about the world, this infrequently translates to running for office or aspirations to work in politics. They find: Just 11 percent of respondents said that they had thought about running office “many times” while 61 percent said they “never” considered it. Asked if various jobs paid the same, they find just 13 percent of respondents said they would want to be a member of Congress, versus 37 percent who chose business executive and 27 percent school principal; only 19 percent indicated that a future goal was to become a political leader. And less than 10% of respondents said that their parents would want them to pursue a job as a member of Congress, compared to around 50 percent for owning a business.

Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution of this urban dance form in the French context. Following the choreography and performances of key figures from the hip hop world in France, McCarren’s is a history that pays close attention to dancers and their moves, and especially to the ways in which contemporary dance is informed by-and responsive to-social and political concerns and change. Tracing the history of le hip hop as a form that arrived in France from the United States in the 1980s, French Moves examines the ways this cultural import came to “speak French”. Dance has occupied a privileged place in French national culture historically.French hip hop benefited from the outset from the support of a Socialist government interested in encouraging this meeting of street and stage in performances that embody youth, cultural diversity, and a mouvement social on a number of levels. Considering politics, poetics, techniques and technologies, the book has exciting and important implications for how we think about bodies and borders. It will be of great interest to anyone thinking through issues of citizenship and difference, from the end of the twentieth century up through the complexities of identity and nation in present-day France.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky is the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at New York University. There has been a lot written about the Occupy Wall Street movement, but little with the sophistication and personal touch of Gould-Wartofsky’s new book. What emerged in the fall of 2011 in Lower Manhattan had roots in similar protests going on across Europe, but soon spread to over a thousand US cities. As a participant observer from the very earliest days of the movement, Gould-Wartofsky blends writing styles and perspectives as he deepens what we know about social movements, in general. He maps the various tactics, factions, and motivations that drove the movement, but also what it felt like to be in Zuccotti Park.

We typically make decisions based on a projection of their likely outcome with respect to the things we value. We seek to maximize of enhance the things we think are good, and minimize what we think is bad. But sometimes we are faced with a decision where we must choose whether to undergo an experience that will likely transform us in fundamental ways, perhaps even change our sense of what’s valuable or important. Indeed, sometimes we must choose whether to in effect become a different kind of person. How should decisions like these be made? In Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014), L. A. Paul examines a range of cases where agents must choose whether or not be transformed in fundamental ways that they, the agents, cannot grasp in advance of the transformation. As it turns out, choices of this transformative kind are far more common than one might think.

Much of the public debate about the relationship between science and theology has been antagonistic or adversarial. Proponents on both sides argue that their respective claims are contradictory–that the claims of science trump and even discredit the claims of religion or theology. Some have sought to portray the relationship in a different light. The evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould famously asserted that the two realms were “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But recently theologians and scientists have begun to mark out new ground for robust conversation. Tom McLeish‘s book Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford University Press, 2014) takes this conversation to new heights. Locating the impulse for science in much biblical literature, particularly the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, he shows how one might understand science as a theological endeavor. Rather than a paradigm of “science and theology,” he posits a “theology of science,” an interrelationship that not only gives us new eyes with which to read the history of science more coherently but also yields a renewed appreciation for science as part of a “ministry of reconciliation” with the natural world and the causes of human suffering. Tom McLeish is Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University. He studied for his first degree and PhD in polymer physics at the University of Cambridge and in 1987 became a lecturer in physics at the University of Sheffield. In 1993 he took the chair in polymer physics at the University of Leeds. He took up his current position in Durham in 2008. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Physical Society, and the Royal Society. He is also involved in science communication with the public via radio, television, and school lectures, discussing topics ranging from the physics of slime to the interaction of faith and science.

Is the present time uniquely real, or do past or future equally exist? Does saying the word “now” simply express the speaker’s current position in time the way “here” expresses her current position in space? In Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015), M. Joshua Mozersky, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, argues for ontological commitment to past, present, and future alike, and provides an account of tensed language in which the underlying meaning of “was”, “is”, and “will be” is actually tenseless. Mozersky deftly defends his eternalist view by countering arguments for the main alternatives, in which only the present exists, or at most only the past and the present exist, and by showing how eternalism provides the best account of the passage of time and is not just consistent with three-dimensionalism (or endurantism) but also provides the best account of it.

Is yoga religious? This question has not only been asked recently by the broader public but also posed in the courts. Many argue that of course it is. The story of yoga in the popular imagination is often narrated as an ancient wisdom tradition that informs contemporary postural movements which are intricately connected and indivisible. Others contend that contemporary yoga is simply a set of health practices that have nothing to do with religion. In Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014), Andrea Jain, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, helps us navigate the recent history of yoga in the west and the debates surrounding its ‘religious’ nature. Overall, what we find is that while yoga has been mediate through an emerging global consumer market and branded for strategic purposes it can still be seen to serve the function of a body of religious practice for many practitioners. In our conversation we discussed Hindu, Buddhist, Jain variations of yogic practice, Ida Craddock’s Church of Yoga, legal definitions, Iyengar Yoga, Siddha Yoga, and Anusara Yoga, Theosophists and Transcendentalists, Swami Vivikenanda’s Vedanta Society, counterculture yogis, consumer culture and the mass market, Christian Yogaphobia, the Hindu American Foundation, and the politics of yoga.

Lee Drutman is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (Oxford UP 2015). Drutman is a senior fellow at New America. How do corporations seek influence in Washington? And should we be worried? Drutman’s book moves beyond simple notions of how money and politics intertwine with nuanced writing and a bundle of new data analysis. He finds that corporate interest in politics has grown enormously since the 1970s, and now represents the vast majority of lobbying in Washington. But rather than simply placing money into a political “vending machine”, Drutman shows a much more complex and muddled political process. Corporations win as often as they lose, and the growth in lobbying has to be understood in more sophisticated than simple “pay-to-play” descriptions. Drutman is worried, but not for the exact reasons you might expect, and he ends his book with ambitious proposals to reform lobbying and national policy making.

Since September 2014, much of Mexico has been gripped by the story of the Ayotzinapa kidnappings – the mass abduction of 43 rural schoolteachers in Iguala in the state of Guerrero. The tragic disappearance of the students has raised questions about the origins, nature, and methods of terror that have seized the nation. Alexander Avina’s new book, Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014), details the origins and memories of state violence during the peasant movement in Guerrero in the 1960s and 1970s. While the nation has long been heralded for its economic growth and political stability in the mid-twentieth century–the so-called Mexican Miracle– Avina reveals the deep, but overlooked, forms of everyday violence waged by the state at the local level. Using declassified military and intelligence records with oral histories of peasants, this work examines the mobilization of two peasant groups from Guerrero know as the Party of the Poor (PLDP) and the National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR). Behind leaders from the normales rurales (rural schools), such as Genaro Vazquez and Lucio Cabanas, Guerrero’s peasants challenged the structural violence and methods of domination of national party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), to advocate for inclusion into the democratic process, greater access to markets, and land reform. They looked to the principles of the Mexican Revolution as they organized through direct civic participation, democratic action, and guerrilla resistance. Beyond simply chronicling this overlooked period in the nation’s past, Avina illustrates that the revolutionary struggles of the peasant movement continues to be fought in the historical memory of the people of Guerrero today. This is a tremendously important work and, somewhat tragically, a timely one as well.

Adolf Hitler famously (and probably) said in a speech to his military leaders “Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?” This remark is generally taken to suggest that future generations won’t remember current atrocities, so there’s no reason not to commit them. The implication is that memory has something like an expiration date, that it fades, somewhat inevitably, of its own accord. At the heart of Fatma Muge Gocek’s book is the claim that forgetting doesn’t just happen. Rather, forgetting (and remembering) happens in a context, with profound political and personal stakes for those involved. And this forgetting has consequences. Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians 1789-2009 (Oxford University Press, 2015) looks at how this process played out in Turkey in the past 200 years. Gocek looks at both the mechanisms and the logic of forgetting. In doing so she sets the Turkish decisions to reinterpret the Armenian genocide into a longer tale of modernization and collective violence. And she illustrates the complicated ways in which remembering and forgetting collide.

Paul K. Saint-Amour, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is a ruminative thinker and meticulous writer. These traits pay dividends in the surprising insights of his new book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford University Press, 2015), which reframes total war and literature in the interwar years and in the present moment. The book’s articulation of the partiality of total war, especially its focus on violence committed in the so-called periphery–which denies civilians the protections of officially declared war–is all too familiar in the present. Tense Future, like the texts it examines, defamiliarizes works we thought we knew well. It also makes strange some of the familiar narratives within the field of modernist studies, like that concerning the genre of the Modern Epic. Tense Future decouples encyclopedic form from the modern epic, showing how the encyclopedia inspired interwar writers to playfully wrest totality out of the suffocating grip of total war. Saint-Amour’s boldest claim, that we live in perpetual interwar, sutures the drone attacks of the present to air-war theories developed after the zeppelin raids of WWI. Our own future, though not foreclosed, is nonetheless subject to the aperture of the past. Tense Future reminds us of futures past in order to pry open a little room for hope.

Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both visual and text. But it is not necessarily the ubiquity of screens that has societal implications. The significance is in how screens fundamentally change how we ingest information. In her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford University Press, 2015), Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching, Research & Learning at American University, asserts that despite the benefits of convenience and monetary savings, reading onscreen has many drawbacks. Using surveys of millennials in the United States, Japan and Germany, combined with anecdotes, and information from writers, Baron provides evidence of the impact of technology on reading, and thinking, in society. Just listen.

“Conspiracy theories are neither the vile excrescence of puny minds nor the telltale symptom of a sick society. They are the ineradicable stuff of politics.”That’s a quotation from American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford UP, 2014), by Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, two professors of political science at the University of Miami.Their study of conspiracy theories concludes that nearly all Americans hold conspiracy beliefs and that “conspiracy theories bring to the surface people’s deepest political anxieties.”The book studies American conspiracy theories over 120 years from 1890 to 2010. It analyzes well-known conspiracy theories such as the many about the assassination of JFK and the events of 9/11 to more obscure ones such as the Congressional plot to kill pet dogs. In this interview with the New Books Network, co-author Joseph Uscinski suggests American conspiracy theories can teach us a lot about everyday politics.

When did religion begin in South Asia? Many would argue that it was not until the colonial encounter that South Asians began to understand themselves as religious. In Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India (Oxford University Press, 2012), Peter Gottschalk, Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University, outlines the contingent and mutual coalescence of science and religion as they were cultivated within the structures of empire. He demonstrates how the categories of Hindu and Muslim were constructed and applied to the residents of the Chainpur nexus of villages by the British despite the fact that these identities were not always how South Asians described themselves. Throughout this study we are made aware of the consequences of comparison and classification in the study of religion. Gottschalk engages Jonathan Z. Smith’s modes of comparison demonstrating that seemingly neutral categories serve ideological purposes and forms of knowledge are not arbitrary in order. Here, we observe this work through imperial forms of knowledge production in South Asia, including the roles of cartographers, statisticians, artists, ethnographers, and photographers. In the end we witness the social consequences of British scientism and its effects on the construction of the category of religion in South Asia. In our conversation we discuss mapmaking, travel writing, Christian theology, the authority of positioning, the census, folklore studies, ethnographies, royal societies, museums, indigenous identifications, and theories for the study of religion.

A colleague once told me that people in linguistics could be divided into two groups: sheep and snipers. I’m not sure whether this is a proper dichotomy – it’s certainly not quite canonical – but whether it is or not, Pieter Seuren is an example of a linguist who is most emphatically not a sheep. His book From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the Theory of Language (Oxford UP, 2013) develops a number of themes concerning aspects of language that are problematic for existing theories, and yet have been accidentally (he stresses) overlooked in the recent intellectual history of the field. Adopting a broadly universalist standpoint, he is critical of approaches that reject the idea of even looking for generalisations and unity, but he is also critical of many aspects of the programmes that have attempted to find order in language. This is not a book that many people will agree with from cover to cover, but it is one that persuasively challenges much of the accumulated “wisdom” of any given school of linguistic thought. I hope this interview gives some idea of the breadth and depth of the undertaking.

Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos are the authors of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2014). McAdam is The Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and the former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Kloos is a scholar of political sociology and social movements at Stanford University, where she is a PhD candidate. What has gotten us to this point of high political polarization and high income inequality? McAdam and Kloos offer a novel answer to what divides us as a country that focuses on the role social movements have in pulling parties to the extremes or pushing parties to the middle. They argue that the post-World War II period was unusual for its low levels of social movement activities and the resulting political centrism of the 1950s. The Civil Rights movement that followed – and the related backlash politics of the Southern Democrats – pushed the parties away from the center and toward regional realignment. Along the way, activists re-wrote party voting procedures that reinforced the power of vocal minorities within each party, thereby entrenching political polarization for the decades to come.

What is it to be the same person over time? The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke approached this question from a forensic standpoint: persons are identified over time with an appropriately related series of psychological states, in particular a chain of memories, and our interest in identifying persons in this way stems from our interest in holding people responsible for their actions. Locke’s psychological account of persons remains highly influential today, although his forensic approach is more contentious. In Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life (Oxford University Press 2014), Marya Schechtman builds on the Lockean idea of persons as forensic units, expanding it to include a much wider range of practical concerns and recognizing the role of sociological and biological factors in these relationships. Schechtman, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, articulates her view in relation to a range of prominent competing positions, in particular Eric Olson’s influential animalist account in which human persons just are human bodies.

After “Schindler’s List,” it became customary for my students, and I, to repeat the slogan “Never Again.” We did so seriously, with solemn expressions on our faces and intensity in our voices. But, if I’m being honest, I also uttered this slogan with some trepidation. For, while I believed absolutely in the necessity of such a commitment, I didn’t really know how to carry it out.Looking at Bosnia and Rwanda, then the Sudan and the Congo, such affirmations confronted the messy reality of our world. Ervin Staub‘s recent book Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict and Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2010), offers a refreshing hint of possibility. Staub has been working on the question of why people participate in mass violence for decades (his earlier book The Roots of Evil is one of the foundational texts in the field of perpetrator studies). In his most recent book, he offers concrete guidelines and strategies for reducing the possibility and frequency of mass violence in our world. Staub is not a dreamer–he has no illusions that genocide and terrorism can be eliminated immediately. But he believe both that it is everyone’s obligation to try and create a world in which mass violence is less prevalent and that such a world is in fact possible. The book offers both a comprehensive summary of what psychology can tell us about the behavior of perpetrators and a lengthy set of recommendations. It should be an important resource for both scholars and practitioners for years to come. Update: Overcoming Evilhas won the 2012 Alexander George Book Award of The International Society of Political Psychology for the Best Book Published in 2011 in the Field of Political Psychology, and also won the the 2013 Ursula Gielen Global Psychology Book Award of the International Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association for significant and fundamental contributions to psychology as a global discipline.

In Muslims in the Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sophia Rose Arjana explores a variety of creative productions–including art, literature, film–in order to tell a story not about how Muslims construct their own identities but rather about how Western thinkers have constructed ideas about Muslims and monsters. To what extent are these imaginary constructs real? Is it possible for one’s imagination to create things that are more telling than what is actually real? Arjana’s monograph is compelling, in part, because of the plethora of examples she offers–from a range of cultures and time periods–to help us understand just how deeply stereotypes and fears run in the very fabric of Western imaginations. She demonstrates, in fact, that it’s not just Muslims who are portrayed in troubling ways, but also characters that seem foreign to any extent. Dracula, for example, pushes boundaries between Muslim and Jewish–and is also not quite human; in this way, Arjana draws important parallels between the historically contingent categories of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Arjana also draws on films, such as Star Wars and 300, while noting that not all Orientalist imagery is necessarily offensive, even if some of it clearly is for many people. Whether the book ultimately conveys despair or optimism about the current state of cultural affairs will likely vary from reader to reader. It remains clear, however, that Arjana meticulously and artfully portrays a long continuum of how certain types of people have seen themselves as civilized and human, precisely in relation to an inhuman or “post-human” contrast that fits somewhere in the category of Muslim monsters. Given the wide range of popular cultural icons that Arjana explores in her carefully written, rich, and provocative monograph appeals at once to fields such as literature, gender studies, art history, religious studies, and political science.

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn‘s An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 (Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2014) offers what is in many ways is an untold, insider’s account of the birth of the Taliban and Al Qaeda during the anti-Soviet jihad, and their subsequent cooperation (or indeed lack thereof) in the pre- and post-9/11 world. By living first in Kabul, and then Kandahar, Afghanistan, the authors gained more privileged access to individuals involved with Afghan history in the 1980s-2000s than perhaps anyone outside of Western intelligence agencies. By speaking with Taliban officials — indeed Van Linschoten and Kuehn’s previous project was editing the memoirs of Taliban senior official Abdul Salam Zaeef – and former “Afghan Arabs”, the authors enriched their research immensely. The result shows in the final product: a nuanced, deeply layered, and meticulously investigative look at a fascinating subject. An Enemy We Createdshould be seen as paradigmatic for future research on militant organizations, and offers up an immense challenge to those experts who would seek to write on such topics from the comfort of Western armchairs.”

In his new book Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2014),Neilesh Bose analyses the trajectories of Muslim Bengali politics in the first half of the twentieth century.The literary and cultural history ofthe region explored in the book reveal the pointedly Bengali ideas of Pakistan that arose as an empire ended and new countries were born.

Daniel DiSalvo is the author ofGovernment against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2015). DiSalvo is associate professor of political science at the City College of New York, CUNY, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. It is rare that an academic book attracts attention and stokes real controversy, but look to DiSalvo as the first of 2015 to set the social media afire. DiSalvo challenges many conventional notions about unions, primarily the work of public sector unions, during a period of strained state and local finance. He claims that many of the arguments for the importance of private sector unions – those representing manufacturing and other private employees – are largely inapplicable to private sector unions – those representing teachers, police and fire personnel, and other government workers. The special position of public sector unions, at once distinct from government, but also deeply entrenched in government, sets up peculiar negotiating dynamics. DiSalvo claims that public sector unions are given “two bites at the apple” on their interests, permitted to collectively bargain contracts, but also lobby those at the bargaining table in the larger political process.

In understanding a tradition what is the relationship between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’? How do the lived religious lives of practitioners contest or affirm authority? In The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicism (Oxford University Press, 2014), Joseph Laycock, assistant professor of religious studies at Texas State University, explores the implicit power of definitional boundaries through a study of a community that is simultaneously insider and outsider. The book is an introduction to Veronica Lueken, who had apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and other Catholic saints, and a history of the movement that developed around her, the Baysiders. Laycock framed this unfolding history within the movement’s evolving relationship with Church authorities. The narrative presents Lueken’s early visions, the community of followers that rose up around here, and the continued conflict they received from the Church, their neighbors, and each other. The case is useful for understanding the creation of meaning through the contestation of tradition and questions of what gets to count as orthodox. In our conversation we discussed the Second Vatican Council, UFOs, technologies of power, the Pope, imagined communities, ethnography, New Religious Movements, abnormal Polaroid pictures, conspiracy theories, and the construction of sacred space.

Religious ritual has been a staple of anthropological study. In his latest monograph, Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford University Press 2014), cultural anthropologist Matt Tomlinson takes up the topic anew through a set of four case studies drawn from his fieldwork in Fiji. Each one illustrates a component of what Tomlinson calls ritual entextualization, the process by which discourse becomes texts that are detachable from their original contexts and thus replicable. Through this framework, Tomlinson explores how rituals are patterned, repeated events that are also in “motion,” flexible and dynamic. Along the way, readers are introduced to linguistic performances in Pentecostal revivals, semiotic similarities between kava drinking and Christian communion, spectacles of a “happy death” in nineteenth-century missions, and political wrangling following the recent military coup d’état.

Daniel Prosterman‘s new book Defining Democracy:Electoral Reform and the Struggle for Power in New York City (Oxford University Press, 2013) investigates a neglected topic in U.S. history: the occasional efforts by reformers over the years to bring proportional representation to America. No democracy in the world today is less representative by the standard of “one person, one vote.” (In 2000, three states with more than a quarter of the population, had just six Senators, for example. The seventeen least populous states, with seven percent of the population, had thirty-four.) This is actually an improvement over the past, when various mal-apportionment schemes essentially disenfranchised huge numbers of voters in virtually every state. Prosterman’s book does not look at the national scene, but takes us instead through New York City’s brief experiment with a quirky form “STV” (single transferable vote), the standard in most democracies. Like so many imported European reforms in the early 1900’s, the American version had a fraught experience. But as Prosterman painstakingly details it also invigorated the electoral system in New York, opening the field to an unusually diverse set of candidates for the time: women, blacks, even Communists. To the horror of even formerly sympathetic reformers, like Al Smith. In the end, an equally strange pack of bedfellows conspired to destroy the practice, which locals had voted for overwhelmingly. Yet, for all its flaws and historical particularities, the experiment stands as a useful reminder that democracy is now just about who votes, but how that vote is counted.

When a contemporary reader opens up their Bible they may be unaware of the long historical process that created the pages within. One of the key components in this history is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures between the third century BCE and the second century CE. Timothy Michael Law, Lecturer in Divinity in the University of St. Andrews, offers a thorough chronicle of the creation and afterlife of the Septuagint in When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (Oxford University Press, 2013). Through this narrative Law also interrogates broader concerns, such as the ways we examine canons and scriptures during this period, translation in the ancient world, authorial intentions, and audience receptions. The book covers the role the Septuagint in the Bible’s lengthy history up until the present and demonstrates how our contemporary engagement with it can illuminate numerous shadowy paths in Religious Studies. In our conversation we discussed Hellenistic Judaism, apocrypha, Jerome, the Hebrew Bible, Origen’s Hexapla, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Biblical citation, Augustine, the Protestant reformation, Eusebius, and academic writing for public audiences.

In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr. Ernest P. Young shows in his fascinating exploration of this issue in his Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate (Oxford University Press, 2013). In this well-researched work, Dr. Young shows why many Catholics missionaries, including those who were not French, were willing to look to French protection in China, and how that impeded the growth of an indigenous, acculturated church. Dr. Young also tells the fascinating story of how a few missionaries, sympathetic to Chinese aspirations and wishing to build a truly Chinese Catholic Church, worked with the Vatican in an attempt to undermine the French Protectorate. As readers of this fine book will find, the merely partial success of this project has echoes that still reverberate in China today.

Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments. Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting. It is commonly held that legitimate government requires a system of universal suffrage. Yet, democrats tend to hold that certain exclusions are permissible. For example, it is commonly thought that children and the mentally impaired may justifiably be disenfranchised. We also tend to think that the disenfranchisement of felons and non-citizen residents is permissible. Indeed, these exclusion are often thought to be consistent with universal suffrage. In Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions (Oxford University Press, 2014), Claudio Lopez-Guerra challenges our common understanding of voting. Ultimately, he argues in favor of an elitist system of enfranchisement by lottery. He also criticizes arguments that universal suffrage is consistent with the exclusion of children, the mentally impaired, felons, and resident non-citizens. The result is a fascinating and provocative exploration of, and challenge to, the fundamental idea that voting is a basic right.