Shows / In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Interviews with Oxford University Press authors about their books
Episodes
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Craig Lockard, “Southeast Asia in World History” (Oxford UP, 2009)
A book called Southeast Asia in World History (Oxford University Press, 2009) might seem on the face of it to be out of place on a blog about South Asia. But…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Bryan J. Cuevas, “Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet” (Oxford UP, 2008)
Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Samuel Zipp, “Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York” (Oxford UP, 2010)
If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Today’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Alan Jacobs, “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (Oxford UP, 2011)
In his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Martha Minow, “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark” (Oxford UP, 2011)
What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Adam Hodges, “The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Many entries in our lexicon have an interesting history, but it’s very seldom the case that the currency of a phrase has global repercussions. In his book The…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
David McMahan, “The Making of Buddhist Modernism” (Oxford UP, 2008)
For many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Rodric Braithwaite, “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89” (Oxford UP, 2011)
I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Mark Bradley, “Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire” (Oxford UP, 2010)
The Greco-Roman world was the prism through which the British viewed their imperial efforts, and Mark Bradley’s compendium Classics and Imperialism in the…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Rajshree Chandra, “Knowledge as Property, Issues in the Moral Grounding of Intellectual Property Rights” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Copyright is one of those topics over which even two saints disagreed. The legend has it that Saint Columba and Saint Finnian engaged in an argument as Columba…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Sanford Goldberg, “Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2010)
In our attempts to know and understand the world around us, we inevitably rely on others to provide us with reliable testimony about facts and states of…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Robert Pasnau, “Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671” (Oxford UP, 2011)
What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Kwasi Konadu, “The Akan Diaspora in the Americas” (Oxford UP, 2010)
How can those in African, Africana, and African American Studies strengthen their disciplinary ties? What do these connections have to do with Kwasi Konadu‘s…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Jonathan Steinberg, “Bismarck: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2011)
What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Erik Jensen, “Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Thomas de Waal, “The Caucasus: An Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2010)
On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration” (Oxford UP, 2010)
You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
David Day, “Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others” (Oxford UP, 2008)
People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Mark Bradley, “Vietnam at War” (Oxford UP, 2009)
My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or “Thuds.” He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called “Thud Ridge.” He’d come home on…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young, “Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars” (Oxford UP, 2008)
What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Catherine Epstein, “Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland” (Oxford UP, 2010)
The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Deborah Kaple, “Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Here’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of humanity. For…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Thomas Kessner, “The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Try to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part of our daily experience. Just look up and you’ll probably see one, or at…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Amanda Podany, “Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East” (Oxford UP, 2010)
I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Gary Bruce, “The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi” (Oxford UP, 2010)
I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Todd Moye, “Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II” (Oxford UP, 2010)
In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known to history as…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization” (Oxford UP, 2006)
Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,”…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Michael Kranish, “Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
The past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybody and his…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Fearghal McGarry, “The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as far as I…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Joel Wolfe, “Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Charles King, “The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus” (Oxford UP, 2008)
There’s a concept I find myself coming back to again and again–“speciation.” It’s drawn from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology and means, roughly, the…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Jennifer Burns, “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right” (Oxford UP, 2009)
When I was in high school I had several friends who went to Wichita’s only prep school. They were nice guys, played D&D, andsaid they were “Libertarians.”I…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Jack Greene and Philip Morgan, “Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal” (Oxford UP, 2008)
This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is offering in conjunction with the National History Center. The NHC and Oxford University…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Kevin Kenny, “Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment” (Oxford UP, 2009)
It’s hard to be a Christian. It’s even harder to be a good Christian. But being a good Christian on the frontier of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Charles Postel, “The Populist Vision” (Oxford UP, 2007)
Ever wonder where the term “populist” came from? It came from “Populism,” a nineteenth/early twentieth-century American political movement. Of course the…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Susan Brewer, “Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq” (Oxford UP, 2009)
Like it or not, governments need to mobilize their populations in times of crisis and one of the ways they do it is to disseminate propaganda. Now this is…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Benjamin Carp, “Rebels Rising: Cities in the American Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2007)
When I was in college about a million years ago, we used to sit in bars and talk about the Revolution. Actually, it was this bar and something like this…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Simon Morrison, “The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years” (Oxford UP, 2009)
In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though relatively poor, the USSR poured resources into the arts. The Party…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Vicki Ruiz, “From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America” (Oxford UP, 2008)
There was a time when “history” was the history of powerful people. Shakespeare captures this notion of history in the prologue to Henry V: O for a Muse of…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Donald Worster, “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir” (Oxford UP, 2008)
If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Howard Jones, “The Bay of Pigs” (Oxford UP, 2008)
There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don’t like very much. Maybe it’s the long-winded anti-American diatribes. Maybe it’s the…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Christopher Capozzola, “Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of The Modern American Citizen” (Oxford UP, 2008)
I confess I sometimes wonder where we got in the habit of proclaiming, usually with some sort of righteous indignation, that we have the “right” to this or…
- In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Colin Grant, “Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey” (Oxford UP, 2008)
Today we are happy to have Colin Grant on the show. Colin is that rare breed of writer who is also an excellent historian. Or is that “rare breed of historian…