In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

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In Conversation: An OUP Podcast episodes

  • Edward T. G. Anderson, "Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Hindu nationalism is transforming India as an increasingly dominant

    ideology and political force. But it is also a global phenomenon, with
    sections of India’s vast and influential diaspora drawn to, or actively
    supporting, right-wing Hindu nationalism. Indians overseas can be seen
    as an important, even inextricable, aspect of the movement. This is not a
    new dynamic—diasporic Hindutva has grown over many decades.

    Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism

    (Oxford University Press, 2024) explores how and why the movement
    became popular among India’s diaspora from the second half of the
    twentieth century. It shows that Hindutva ideology and its plethora of
    organizations have a distinctive resonance and way of operating
    overseas; the movement and its ideas perform significant, particular
    functions for diaspora communities.
    Edward T.G. Anderson argues that
    transnational Hindutva cannot simply be viewed as an export: this
    phenomenon has evolved and been shaped into an important aspect of
    diasporic identity, a way for people to connect with their homeland. He
    also sheds light on the impact of conservative Indian politics on
    British multiculturalism, migrant politics and relations between various
    minority communities.

    Sachin Nikarge has

    extensively worked in consultative capacity with prominent
    foreign/diplomatic missions across both ‘hard’ as well as ‘soft’ power
    domains.


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    1 hr 2 min
  • Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz and Alaka Atreya Chudal "The Swasthani Vrata Katha" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    The Swasthani Vrata Katha is the most widely read, recited, and listened to Hindu devotional text, especially of local indigenous origin, among Hindu laity in Nepal. Dedicated to and itself the physical embodiment of a local goddess named Swasthani, Nepali Hindus recite the Swasthani every year from cover to cover over the winter month of Magh (January–February). It is a collection of widely circulating Hindu myths about gods, demons, and divine dalliances that forefront Shiva, Sati, and Parvati but it is also a local folk story about women’s real, everyday hardships and the rewards of attending to one’s dharma and devotion to the goddess Swasthani. The Swasthani Vrata Katha: A Secret Vow to the Goddess (Oxford UP, 2026) is the first full-length English translation of the Swasthanifrom the original Nepali. Just like Parvati made Swasthani and her story known beyond the realm of the gods to the human realm, so, too, this translation makes them known beyond Nepal to a broad English-speaking audience.

    Open Access: here


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    53 min
  • Emily Sneff, "When the Declaration of Independence Was News" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Amy Weitzman interviews Emily Sneff on her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News and the graduate school experience.

    In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators.

    When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution.

    Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it.


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    42 min
  • Elijah Wald, "Rock ‘N’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Rock 'n' roll appeared in the 1950s as the high-energy, electrically amplified music of young dancers and listeners, first in the United States and then around the globe, and from the beginning it symbolized more than music. First popularized as a marketing rubric to sell African-American rhythm and blues to white teenagers, it stood for racial integration, sexual freedom, youthful rebellion, and for change and modernity. It was never a single kind of music, and historians disagree about when it began and which artists or records should be included in its canon--but it was always a flashpoint, whether condemned as an assault on cultural standards or hailed as the most exciting movement of the twentieth century.

    Rock ‘N’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2026) explores the complex musical styles and evolutions of the genre and also examines it as product, symbol, and vehicle of societal change. The introduction seamlessly integrates the genre with elements of 1955-1965's mass influence including the rise of television and niche radio formats, the civil rights movement, a new concept of "teenagers" as a unique age group, and a sexual revolution. Rock 'n' Roll traces the rise and trajectories of the styles and musicians grouped as rock 'n' roll and their journey to becoming emblems of much more

    Elijah Wald is a Grammy winning writer, musician, and historian. His books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music; Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories; The Mayor of MacDougal Street (source for the movie Inside Llewyn Davis); and Dylan Goes Electric! (source for the movie A Complete Unknown). He has taught at various universities and holds a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics.

    Elijah Wald’s website.

    Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

    Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.


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    51 min
  • Steven K. Green, "American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Today I'm speaking with Steven K. Green, Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History and Religious Studies at Willamette University. We are discussing his book, American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2026). Since the first permanent Protestant settlement in Jamestown in 1607, Protestant Christianity has waxed and waned through a series of revivals, migrations, and challenges from alternative faiths like Catholicism and Mormonism. The Gilded Age, from roughly 1870 to 1900, was a unique period for Protestantism in American history. Most Americans still subscribed to a Protestant faith, though threats began to arise not from other confessions, but rather from philosophical and scientific challengers. The so-called freethinkers represented a broad range of beliefs and ideas, being united by a mutual skepticism of religious conservatism and traditional sexual and gender mores. American Infidelity tells the story of this tug-of-war for the soul of a nation, with Christianity on one side and the legacy of thinkers like Thomas Paine on the other.

    Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.


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    58 min
  • Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth, "Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    In Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions (Oxford University Press,

    2026), Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth reveal the vast and
    complex world of France's Atlantic enterprises in the premodern era.
    Drawing upon years of archival work, Hodson and Rushforth demonstrate
    how France's overseas activities created its empire, intentionally or
    not, and how these distant places built the French state and used it for
    their own ends. Beyond the Ocean covers an impressive sweep of
    history, from the late eleventh century through the early nineteenth,
    and yet the authors manage to retain a human element. Their judicious
    inclusion of micro-histories and primary-source quotation, as well as
    their lively prose, helps the reader enter into what it may have felt
    like to live through these developments, to participate in the era when
    "France became France, and the Atlantic became a world."
    Crucially, their attention to the non-European actors in this story and
    women's worlds and work makes the book a helpful corrective to top-down
    approaches to imperial histories. Beyond the Ocean is a must-read for Atlantic world scholars, but has value for anyone interested in early modern Europe or cultural exchange.

    Elspeth Currie

    is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where
    she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.


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    1 hr 22 min
  • Jenny R. Labendz, "Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    In Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective (Oxford UP, 2026) Jenny Labendz addresses distinct patterns within rabbinic eschatology that have been overlooked in scholarship and in Jewish thought. Contrary to what is usually expected of eschatology, this book demonstrates that the rabbis held a sustained eschatology of irresolution. While the rabbis occasionally waxed poetic along the lines of a perfected new world in the eschaton, a vast store of rabbinic texts depicts a deeply imperfect eschaton. This is the profound difference between rabbinic and early Christian eschatology.
    Despite its differences from the Christian doctrine of perfection, rabbinic eschatology aligns neatly with a different Christian concept, namely inaugurated eschatology. The eschaton is not only be hoped for in the future, but can be attained in the present. The best of all possible worlds has not yet been entirely actualized, but it has been inaugurated, in the rabbinic view by the exodus from slavery in Egypt, the revelation of the Torah at Sinai, and the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. This is a paradigm shift for thinking about rabbinic eschatology, which rejects the dogmas and binaries that generations of scholars have taken for granted.

    In this new book, Jenny Labendz explores the relationship between this world and the best possible world, the limits of that best possible world, and asks a crucially grounding question--what are we talking about when we're talking about the end of the world?

    Interviewee: Jenny R. Labendz received her PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2010 and was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Francis College until 2025. She is also the author of Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture, published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

    Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.


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    52 min
  • Anna Lively, "Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Anna Lively is a historian of modern Ireland, Britain, and Russia. Awarded her PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2022, she is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this she held the Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellowship in the History and Culture of Ireland at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and was a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Aberdeen. She has published in multiple journals on the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and on the Irish Save the Children Fund.

    From the late nineteenth century, Ireland featured prominently in Russian liberal, conservative, and radical debates about land politics, self-determination, and empire. Equally, Irish commentators from across the political spectrum used Russia as a lens onto questions of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. But while the Irish and Russian revolutionary contexts are well-studied in isolation, their myriad political, social, and cultural entanglements are not.
    Drawing on extensive Russian and Irish archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, literary, and visual sources, Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923 (Oxford UP, 2026) looks in both directions at Irish responses to Russian revolutionary change and at representations of Ireland in Russian-language texts from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. The result is a unique account of international engagement in revolutionary Russia and Ireland and of how Ireland was imagined beyond the Anglophone world. This mutual, if selective and conditional, engagement reflected wider technological changes in news communication and the expansion of international news agencies. Diasporic networks, including in Britain and the US, helped to shape Russo-Irish relations and Irish publications and political actors engaged with different parts of the Russian empire, including Ukraine, Finland, and Poland.
    Through five thematic chapters, the book considers Russo-Irish relations from contrasting and often overlooked angles, including Irish eyewitness experiences on the Eastern front during World War One and religious perspectives. Using a transnational methodology and expansive source base, the book offers a fresh angle on the entangled history of revolutions in the early twentieth century and the translation of news and ideas across borders.

    Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905–1923 will be published in September 2026 with Oxford University Press


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    22 min
  • Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart, "Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    The

    early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia.
    The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution,
    and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance
    expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage
    lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State
    (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Michelle Bigenho and Dr. Henry
    Stobart unpacks the myriad motivations for heritage making in this this
    politically transformative moment. Heritage Fever reorients
    UNESCO-driven heritage debates towards a different set of questions—a pivot the authors call “heritage otherwise.”

    These

    inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and
    engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and
    Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate
    aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities.
    Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of
    scale within the country's new political autonomies, even as old-style
    nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights
    imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing
    historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades.

    Privileging

    the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically
    involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever's
    research draws from the authors' combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the
    last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and
    ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in
    heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical
    heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever
    looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on
    archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and
    knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a
    decolonizing state.

    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. 


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    1 hr 3 min
  • Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, "Animals and the Right to Politics" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    The assumption that only humans can engage in politics—that only

    humans are 'zoon politikon'—is foundational to the Western tradition of
    political philosophy. While there is increasing recognition of animals'
    moral status (both within moral philosophy and at the level of public
    opinion), animals are not recognized as political subjects. This
    carefully researched but accessibly written volume—following on from the
    authors' earlier book Zoopolis—argues that animals too have a
    right to politics: a right to be recognized as political subjects and
    agents, and as members of political communities entitled to collective
    self-determination. ⁠Animals and the Right to Politics⁠
    (Oxford University Press, 2026) draws on recent scientific work on
    animal societies, cultures, and decision-making, as well as recent work
    by political theorists rethinking ideas of agency and
    community—especially the significance of emplaced and embodied
    encounters and relationships to the activity of politics. Sue Donaldson
    and Will Kymlicka draw a picture of what it would mean to create spaces
    and practices, not only for politics conducted by humans on behalf of
    animals, but also politics with and by animals on their own terms. It
    then explores how this approach could inform a wide range of
    contemporary debates in human-animal relations, including wildlife
    conservation, urban planning, and animal labour.

    ⁠Sue Donaldson⁠

    is a Canadian author and animal advocate. She has published more than
    40 academic articles, and is the co-author, with Will Kymlicka, of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
    (Oxford University Press, 2011) which won the Canadian Philosophical
    Association Book Prize in 2013, and has been translated into 11
    languages. She is co-convenor of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics,
    Law and Ethics research group at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.

    ⁠Will Kymlicka⁠ is the author of seven books published by Oxford University Press, including Contemporary Political Philosophy (2nd ed., 2001), Multicultural Citizenship (1996), and Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights

    (co-authored with Sue Donaldson; 2011). He is currently the Canada
    Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, a Fellow
    of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Institute for
    Advanced Research, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a
    Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His works have been
    translated into 34 languages.

    ⁠Kyle Johannsen⁠ is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).


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    1 hr 43 min

About In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

From the publisher's feed

Interviews with Oxford University Press authors about their books