In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

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Interviews with Oxford University Press authors about their books

  1. 12 hrs ago

    Stefan Collini, "Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Stefan Collini The study and teaching of English literature is generally regarded as one of the central disciplines in the modern university, yet for much of its history it struggled to gain academic legitimacy and was frequently derided as 'a soft option'. Its early professors responded by emphasizing its scholarly character, foregrounding philology and literary history in ways that marked the syllabus far into the twentieth century. Stefan Collini provides here the first full account of the discipline's development from its late-eighteenth-century beginnings up to the early 1960s. Paying special attention to institutional settings, he challenges numerous assumptions about the character of universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the detailed exploration of syllabuses, exam papers, and other institutional records, the impact of literary criticism is revealed to be later and more partial than is commonly assumed. Rather than seeing the early teaching of English literature as 'a substitute for religion' or 'a means to soften class conflict', Collini emphasizes the role of ideals of learnedness and scholarship, as well as of external factors such as opportunities for employment in the civil service and secondary school-teaching. There are full discussions of the parts played by such figures as John Churton Collins, A.C. Bradley, George Saintsbury, and Walter Raleigh, together with sceptical analyses of the decisive significance usually attributed to Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and F.R. Leavis. Separate chapters are devoted to neglected aspects of the story such as the role of Classics, the importance of the subject for women's higher education, and the connections with English teaching in schools. Drawing on extensive use of institutional archives and records as well as the writings of contemporary participants, the book offers a vivid and wide-ranging history of English-as-discipline and its centrality across academic, literary, cultural, and educational life over the past two year hundred years, as well as a resounding testament to its continued importance and relevance today. Stefan Collini, Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge. Stefan Collini was educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Research Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, he was Lecturer, then Reader, in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex 1974-86; Lecturer, then Reader, then Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge 1986-2014. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and Guardian. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

  2. 2d ago

    Jamie L. Brummitt, "Protestant Relics in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Edward Blum interviews Dr. Jamie L. Brummitt on how new book Protestant Relics in Early America. In Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford UP, 2025), Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life--including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people--sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington's Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women's education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.

  3. 4d ago

    Chenchen Zhang, "Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    With commentary on the emergence of a ‘multipolar’ world, of transatlantic rifts and the rise of ‘middle powers’ ubiquitous, tales of the decline of something called ‘the West’ seem to be everywhere. Yet the meanings the idea of ‘the West’ acquires in spaces beyond it tell us at least as much about the state of the world as portents of its demise. Based on a combination of cultural analysis of historical writings and—most strikingly—deep immersion in often very spicy Chinese social media fora, Chenchen Zhang’s new book Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China (Oxford University Press, 2026) theorises the shifting significations ascribed to ‘the West’ in China since the late-imperial collision with European empires. Whether imagined as a source of modernity, a colonial exploiter, geopolitical rival or—most recently—a civilisation sunk into decadence and decay, ‘the West’—Zhang shows—is a foil for China-based worldviews which, whatever their anticolonial or anti-Western sentiments, are also entangled with Eurocentric hierarchies of race, nation and gender whose patriarchal and civilisational histories are rooted at least partly that very same ‘West’.

  4. 4d ago

    Niharika Pandit, "Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Our recent conversation about Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2026), with author Niharika Pandit, covers the journey of how critical methodology meets the weight of lived experience. This book examines the everyday politics of militarized control in Kashmir following the Indian government’s August 5, 2019, decision to de-operationalize Jammu and Kashmir’s nominal autonomy. The core of our reflection centered on how one theorizes through such an intense archive. The book avoids abstract distance, relying instead on a rigorous post-2019 archive built from ethnographic fieldwork and rooted in interdisciplinary feminist studies. It demonstrates that theorizing is not a passive intellectual exercise, instead, it is an active, grounded practice of mapping power where it is felt most directly. Through intersectional analyses of space, home, time, and storytelling, the text reveals how militarized control operates via spatial, embodied, affective, temporal, and discursive capture. Reflecting on this book serves as a vital reminder that critical theorizing must remain tethered to the grounded realities of resistance.

  5. 6d ago

    Travis Bruce, "Constructing the Medieval Maritime State: Identity, Violence, and Connection in the Mediterranean" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Constructing the Medieval Maritime State: Identity, Violence, and Connection in the Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Professor Travis Bruce explores how the small medieval kingdom of Denia in Spain became a powerful maritime state after the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate. Its rulers built authority, not only through war and seafaring raids but also by connecting Denia to wider Mediterranean trade, diplomacy, and culture. The rise and evolution of the taifa of Denia is a powerful case study for understanding the construction of medieval maritime states in the Mediterranean. Dr. Bruce situates Denia within the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate and explores how its rulers forged legitimacy through identity formation, maritime violence, and regional connectivity. Denia's identity was negotiated through rulership, unfreedom, and cultural hybridity, and violence — particularly predatory warfare and maritime jihad — functioned as both statecraft and economic extraction. At the same time, Denia's entanglement in commercial, diplomatic, and intellectual networks positioned it as a key node linking the Islamic Mediterranean and the Latin West. The state's trajectory cannot be reduced to narratives of decline or simple religious conflict but instead reveals a process of negotiation shaped by mobility, interdependence, and the fluid boundaries between public and private power. This narrative reframes Mediterranean history beyond Eurocentric paradigms and underscores the significance of Islamic maritime states within the wider medieval world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

  6. Aug 20

    Aleksandar Uskokov, "Deciphering the Hidden Meaning: Language and the Highest Good in Early Advaita Vedānta" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Deciphering the Hidden Meaning: Language and the Highest Good in Early Advaita Vedānta (Oxford UP, 2026) presents a transformative history of one of the most significant ideas in Indian philosophy: liberation. Taking the great philosopher Śaṅkara as the focal point, Aleksandar Uskokov analyzes the relationship between liberation, language, and scripture. While modern portraits of Śaṅkara often cast him as a mystic or a religious reformer, the book paints a more complex portrait of the historical Śaṅkara. As a theologian of liberation, Śaṅkara was a maverick within the prevailing Brahmanical ideology of his time. In an intellectual landscape dominated by Mīmāṁsā ritualists and Vedāntic practitioners of meditation, Śaṅkara introduced a radical claim: that the paraṁ śreyas ("highest good") is attained not through action, ritual, or prolonged meditation, but through the immediate, intellectual understanding of the Upaniṣadic identity statements. Uskokov shows that the birth of the mahā-vākya or "great statement"--such as tat tvam asi ("You are That")--was not the work of Śaṅkara himself, but rather his tenth-century follower Sarvajñātman who used the structural logic of the Mīmāṁsā school. The book meticulously traces the evolution of this soteriological model, exploring how early Advaitins navigated complex debates over language, ritual causality, and the nature of the Self. In doing so, it argues that Śaṅkara's most significant contribution was his intervention against Vedic theologians who viewed scripture as a guide for action and meditation rather than primarily informative. Open Access here

  7. Aug 14

    Daniel Byman, "American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Amidst heightened rhetoric and increasing polarization in the United States, American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America (Oxford University Press, 2026) chronicles the causes and consequences of two centuries of mob violence in American history, highlighting exactly what's at stake when we allow leaders to legitimate violence and the mob to rule. For much of American history, members of the majority population of the United States indiscriminately attacked and terrorized minority communities. In some parts of the country, mob violence seemed a near-constant part of the region's history, while in others it was a brief, horrific spasm that perpetrators--but not victims--quickly forgot. In American Pogroms, terrorism expert Daniel Byman argues that there is a word for this type of communal violence: pogrom. Although pogroms are historically associated with the orchestrated campaigns of anti-Jewish violence in Tsarist Russia, Byman asserts that pogroms have been an all-too-frequent feature of American history. Tracing two centuries of communal violence, Byman recounts cases of attacks against American religious minorities such as Catholics and Mormons, the killing of thousands of ethnic Mexicans in Texas, the murder and wholesale expulsion of Chinese workers from the American West, and the repeated attacks on the Black community that killed thousands and enabled decades of brutal discrimination. In all these cases, pogroms helped cement a system of injustice that left religious, ethnic, and racial minorities politically and economically marginalized. While the idea of mob violence now strikes most Americans as unthinkable, Byman warns that increased polarization and selective news consumption in recent years has coarsened discourse and legitimized violence, raising the risk that at least some violence will return. A broad-ranging synthesis of how and why majorities have so frequently resorted to community-level violence to restore or cement their power, American Pogroms illustrates the outsized role of violence in U.S. history and how it shapes the country today. Daniel Byman is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

  8. Aug 13

    Kathleen J. Frydl, "Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    This is a really good book. Really good. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a fascinating, and perhaps unexpected, journey through Catholic hospitals, the expansion of the carceral state, and corporate and union access to the protections of First Amendment freedom of speech. All the while, Kathleen J. Frydl is rigorously constructing an understanding and positioning of the modern corporation within the governmental structures and protections of the American political system. This is a deeply and thoroughly researched book, with details and information coming from legal decisions, law review articles, political theory, congressional acts, federal government notices, historical data and understanding, medical information, and texts in political science, sociology, and economics. It is indeed a tour de force, but the reader doesn’t really notice because it is such a propulsive and captivating narrative about how modern private corporations learned to capture and implement the advocacy practices that the social movements of the postwar period were using to make gains for previously disadvantaged groups (like African Americans, women, those with disabilities, and more). Frydl lays out the foundation for the analysis within the framework of liberalism, classical liberalism and modern liberalism. She takes pains to explain these distinctions and how our understanding of liberalism has also contributed to some of the shifts and adjustments that have transpired. What does become clear in all of the case studies and details is that this is really a story about the United States Congress—not the Judiciary—and that Congress has been responsible for many of these changes, even if these actions seem to elide public attention and scrutiny. In fact, it is very difficult to detect Congress’s role in these instances, where Congress acted to essentially remove the Judiciary’s powers to deliberate in these policy realms. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is about corporate identity politics, and the ways in which corporations worked to fend off regulatory reform, while not exactly using the expected pathways. Since corporations, unlike, say women or African Americans, do not have a history of exclusion or disadvantage within the American political or economic systems, the concept of corporate identity politics seems a bit odd, but Frydl makes a strong case for this understanding, through the case studies of Catholic hospitals and regulatory reform that provides an avenue towards allowing for more religious freedoms and protections for the hospitals themselves; the legislative reforms with regard to criminal codes in the 1970s and 1980s that instituted harsher sentencing guidelines for individuals but much more lax responses to corporate infractions; and finally in a comparative study of corporate speech regulation and speech regulation of labor unions in the United States. Frydl tells the story from all perspectives and dimensions, including who was working behind the scenes to move these protections forward over the past fifty years. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is a very important analysis of the strengthening of the position of corporate entities within the political, legal, and economic systems in the United States. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She is also author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not In My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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