In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Authoritarianism is not something that happens only within the borders of authoritarian regimes. In this episode, Marlies Glasius talks with host Licia Cianetti about her work on “authoritarian practices”, how the sabotage of accountability can take place also within democracies, how it can be transnational, how the actors involved are not always the ones you are thinking about, and what this all means for the future of democracy. Marlies Glasiusis Professor of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author ofAuthoritarian Practices in a Global Age(Oxford UP, 2023). Licia Cianettiis Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you bythe Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation(CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!

In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. "Socialism," he wrote, "has become a distinct substitute" for the church. He was not wrong. In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. They demanded an expanded local, state and federal infrastructure which supported collective bargaining for better pay, shorter work-days, and an array of municipal services. Protestant clergy worried that if the labor movement kept growing in momentum and cultural influence, socialist policies would displace the need for churches and their many ministries to the poor. Even worse, they feared that the labor movement would render the largest Protestant denominations a relic of the nineteenth century. InThe Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement(Oxford UP, 2023), Janine Giordano Drake carefully traces the relationships which Protestant ministers built with labor unions and working class communities. She finds that Protestant ministers worked hard to assert their cultural authority over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously-unaffiliated working-class communities. Moreover, they rarely supported the most important demands of labor, including freedom of speech and the right to collective bargaining. Despite their heroic narratives of Christian social reform, Protestant reformers' efforts to assert their authority over industrial affairs directly undermined workers' efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States. Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches courses in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. You can follow him onX@matthewfsimmons.

Gendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers(Oxford UP, 2024) presents for the first time a partial translation and study of Imam Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi's work, al-Ijaba li-Iradi ma Istadraktahu Aisha Ala al-Sahabah-"The Corrective: Aisha's Rectification of the Companions. "It critically analyses from the perspective of hadith criticism a number of sections presenting Aisha's refutations and corrections of key Companions including, Umar b. al-Khattab, Abdullah b. Abbas, Zayd b. Thabit, and Abu Hurayra, applying classical hadith methodology to the scrutiny of narrators by way of impugnment and validation (al-jarh wa al-tadil) in an effort to re-construct and re-present Aisha as a central authority in Islamic knowledge production. This work constitutes a major rethinking of the Muslim hadith and jurisprudential traditions by evaluating how Aisha responded to hadiths that were circulating and being ascribed, often incorrectly, as authoritative statements of the Prophet Muhammad. From her critique of overwhelmingly male Companions of the Prophet, the study elicits a methodology for hadith criticism which is sure to challenge classical approaches. Sofia Rehman unearths the scholarly acumen of this great female Companion and mother of the believers, in her discussion of several legal positions which Aisha held in contradistinction to many of the male authorities among the Companions. This interdisciplinary study serves as a model for how the voice of Aisha may be given renewed life and significance in the way it re-centres her traditions and thinking. A crucial aspect is its contributing to expanding the horizons of multiple Islamic disciplines. A major contribution to the study of hadith lies in the development of an emergent methodology of Aisha in the scrutiny of the actual statements (matn) of traditions, not just the chains of transmission (isnad). The contributions of this study to the development of the Muslim legal tradition (fiqh) also lies in a framework that emerges from this research based on the pattern of how Aisha approaches juridical matters. The implications for this are many, especially regarding women and their spiritual and daily life and practice.“ Sofia Rehman is an independent scholar of Islam, trained both traditionally in Syria and Turkey, and in Western academia, receiving her PhD from the University of Leeds. She advocates bridging the gap between scholarship on Islam and the Muslim community, setting up critical reading groups with global reach to facilitate learning and empowerment. She is a contributor to Mapping Faith: Theologies of Migration, edited by Lia Shimada, Cut from the Same Cloth?, edited by Sabeena Akhtar and Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation, edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang. She is author of A Treasury of Aisha Bint Abu Bakr. Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.

Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad(Oxford UP, 2024)offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even transforming local practices and traditions. It traces especially how the musical has been indigenized in South Korea and Germany, the commercial centers for Broadway musicals in East Asia and continental Europe. Both countries were occupied after World War II by the United States, which disseminated U.S. American popular music, jazz, movies, and musical theatre in the belief that these nations needed to rebuild their cultures in accordance with U.S. guidelines. By the 1990s, Broadway imports had become phenomenally popular in Seoul and Hamburg while home-grown musicals proliferated that adapted and transformed the prototypes that had been disseminated by the U.S. Although this book focuses on recent musicals, it also looks back through the twentieth century to plot the evolution of musical theatre in South Korea and Germany. Part One considers the key questions: What is a musical? Why is it the great success story of U.S. theatre? How has it been assimilated to musical theatre traditions around the world? Part Two focuses on musical theatre in South Korea, studying the import/export business in large-scale musicals about Korean history and innovative hybrid experiments that mix local performance traditions with the Broadway vernacular. Part Three moves to Europe to analyze the conflicted attitudes toward musicals in the German-speaking world. Its three chapters survey the history of musicals in Germany from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reconfiguration of musical theatre conventions by experimental directors, and finally the ground-breaking German-language productions of Broadway classics by Barrie Kosky and other innovative directors. In the twenty-first century, Broadway-style musical theatre has succeeded in becoming a lingua franca, the template for musical theatre around the world. This book shows how some of the most innovative, beautiful, and exciting musical theatre is being made outside the United States. Peter C. Kunzeis a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

A lot of what we claim to know we learn from other people's testimony: they tell us, and in many ordinary contexts that is enough to gain knowledge. But for many philosophers, aesthetics is different. Such pessimists about aesthetic testimony hold that facts about aesthetic properties – such as Shakespeare's Hamlet being a tragedy, or Picasso's Guernica being anti-war – can't be transmitted by testimony, and can only be learned through first-person experience. InAesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach(Oxford UP, 2022), Jon Robson argues that aesthetic testimony should be treated on a par with testimony in other domains; our deference to others in aesthetic matters is about the same as it is in other areas of knowledge. Robson, who is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, defends a view called contextualist optimism, in which, just as with testimony in other domains, whether we obtain aesthetic knowledge depends on the context in which aesthetic judgments are transmitted. Carrie Figdoris professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Several decades of scholarship have demonstrated that Roman thinkers developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer many perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy explores a range of such Roman philosophical perspectives through thirty-four newly commissioned essays. Where Roman philosophy has long been considered a mere extension of Hellenistic systems of thought, this volume moves beyond the search for sources and parallels and situates Roman philosophy in its distinctive cultural context. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy(Oxford UP,2023)emphasizes four features of Roman philosophy: aspects of translation, social context, philosophical import, and literary style. The authors adopt an inclusive approach, treating not just systematic thinkers such as Cicero and Augustine, but also poets and historians. Topics covered include ethnicity, cultural identity, literary originality, the environment, Roman philosophical figures, epistemology, and ethics. Myrto Garani is Associate Professor of Latin Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is the author of Empedocles Redivivus, co-editor with David Konstan of The Philosophizing Muse, and co-editor with A. N. Michalopoulos and S. Papaioannou of Intertextuality in Seneca's Philosophical Writings. David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University. He is the author of Friendship in the Classical World, Beauty, In the Orbit of Love, and The Origin of Sin. Gretchen Reydams-Schils is Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame and holds concurrent appointments in Classics, Philosophy, and Theology. She is the author of The Roman Stoics and Calcidius on Plato's Timaeus. Morteza Hajizadehis 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; 18thand 19thCentury British Literature.YouTube channel.Twitter.

Carmen Fracchia's bookBlack But Human': Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700(Oxford UP, 2019)is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves. The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers, and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragón, and Portugal. The 'Black but Human' topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a 'black nation' forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings, and sketches for costume books.

InSovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia(Oxford UP, 2023),Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-old question of what constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere. She explores the history of sovereignty through an analysis of the jurisdictional politics involving the princely states of colonial South Asia. Governed by local rulers, these princely states were subject to British paramountcy whilst remaining legally distinct from directly ruled British India. Their legal status and the extent of their rights remained the subject of feverish debates through the entirety of British colonial rule. This book traces the ways in which the language of sovereignty shaped the discourse surrounding the legal status of the princely states to illustrate how the doctrine of sovereignty came to structure political imagination in colonial South Asia and the framework of the modern Indian state. In this podcast, Dr Saksena explores how the various players within British India – international lawyers, British politicians, colonial officials, rulers and bureaucrats of princely states, and anti-colonial nationalists – used definitions of sovereignty to construct political orders in line with their interests and aspirations. By invoking the vernacular of sovereignty in contrasting ways to support their differing visions of imperial and world order, these actors also attempted to reconfigure the boundaries among the spheres of the national, the imperial, and the international. Our discussions chart the debates and disputes over the princely states across two hundred years of Indian history, and how they continually defined and redefined the concept of sovereignty and international legitimacy in South Asia. The podcast explores the importance of the language of international law, how it is used and by whom, and how it is both a counterweight and a shaping force for political power. We discuss how different understandings of sovereignty have been (and still are) influencing the various ways in which people think about organising the world and their relationship to each other. Alex Batesmithis a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. Twitter: @batesmith

Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy. InCombee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War(Oxford UP, 2023),Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the participants in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort. Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida. After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.

Wartime is not just about military success.Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars(Oxford UP, 2020)tells a different story - about a group of remarkable economists who used their skills to help their countries fight their battles during the Chinese-Japanese War, Second World War, and the Cold War. 1935-55 was a time of conflict, confrontation, and destruction. It was also a time when the skills of economists were called upon to finance the military, to identify economic vulnerabilities, and to help reconstruction.Economists at Warfocuses on the achievements of seven finance ministers, advisors, and central bankers from Japan, China, Germany, the UK, the USSR, and the US. It is a story of good and bad economic thinking, good and bad policy, and good and bad moral positions. The economists suffered threats, imprisonment, trial, and assassination. They all believed in the power of economics to make a difference, and their contributions had a significant impact on political outcomes and military ends. Economists at War shows the history of this turbulent period through a unique lens. It details the tension between civilian resources and military requirements; the desperate attempts to control economies wracked with inflation, depression, political argument, and fighting; and the clever schemes used to evade sanctions, develop barter trade, and use economic espionage. Politicians and generals cannot win wars if they do not have the resources. This book tells the human stories behind the economics of wartime. Alan Bollard is a Professor of Economics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He formerly managed APEC, the largest regional economic integration organization in the world, and was previously the New Zealand Reserve Bank Governor, Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury, and Chairman of the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Professor Bollard is the author of Crisis: One Central Bank Governor and the Global Financial Crisis (Auckland University Press, 2013) and A Few Hares to Chase: The Life and Economics of Bill Philips (Oxford University Press, 2016). Morteza Hajizadehis 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; 18thand 19thCentury British Literature.YouTube channel.Twitter.