In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

A History of the Church through its Buildings (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Allan Doig takes the reader to meet people who lived through momentous religious changes in the very spaces where the story of the Church took shape. Buildings are about people, the people who conceived, designed, financed, and used them. Their stories become embedded in the very fabric itself, and as the fabric is changed through time in response to changing use, relationships, and beliefs, the architecture becomes the standing history of passing waves of humanity.This process takes on special significance in churches, where the arrangement of the space places members of the community in relationship with one another for the performance of the church's rites and ceremonies. Moreover, architectural forms and building materials can be used to establish relationships with other buildings in other places and other times. Coordinated systems of signs, symbols, and images proclaim beliefs and doctrine, and in a wider sense carry extended narratives of the people and their faith.Looking at the history of the church through its buildings allows us to establish a tangible connection to the lives of the people involved in some of the key moments and movements that shaped that history, and perhaps even a degree of intimacy with them. Standing in the same place where the worshippers of the past preached and taught, or in a space they built as a memorial, touching the stone they placed, or marking their final resting-place, holding a keepsake they treasured or seeing a relic they venerated, probably comes as close to a shared experience with these people as it is possible to come. Perhaps for a fleeting moment at such times their faces may come more clearly into focus.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Meegan Kennedy examines a revolutionary period in microscopical technology and practice. At first considered a mere toy, by 1900 the microscope rivaled the railway and telegraph as an emblem of modernity and enjoyed an astonishing diversity of applications. This technology could drive scientific debates on subjects like cell theory, vitalism, and bacteriology; guide workers in classrooms, laboratories, and businesses; and inspire a personal hobby or a mass entertainment. Victorian microscopy productively cuts across the ostensibly separate domains of science, religion, commerce, art, education, entertainment, and domestic life.Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy reads nineteenth-century microscopy across scientific, literary, religious, and popular texts. It argues that Victorian microscopists saw their vision and cognition as fully embodied experiences, the images emerging through a material entanglement of bodies (observer, instrument, apparatus, object) in a dynamic, unstable system. These ideas echo the work of physiological psychologists, who proposed mind as a system of embodied, distributed, and dynamic processes shaped by automatic or unconscious reflex action, attention, mental training, and fatigue. Striving to regulate this complex system, microscopists circulated tropes of embodiment through the varied forms of nineteenth-century print culture. They adapted existing concepts (such as beauty, the sublime, natural theology, and fairylands), or coined new phrases (such as many-sided comprehension), to promote favored forms of embodiment and enculturate microscopy as a difficult but valuable pursuit. Writing Embodiment draws on important work in book history and periodical studies by emphasizing the circulation of these tropes in intermedial conversations across diverse print forms.Victorians understood wonder and skepticism not as incommensurate approaches to scientific observation but rather as complementary forms of embodiment. Romantic tropes of wonder solicit affective flows from observer to wriggling animalcule and back; while skeptical, realist tropes offer to train the reader's eye, hand, body, and judgment and to formalize microscopical practice. Microscopical narratives may manipulate wonder and skepticism in productive tension or create virtual storyspaces that enlist the reader in virtual witnessing. These tropes shape every level of microscopical interest and proficiency. By analyzing their use and circulation, Writing Embodiment illuminates wider patterns of Victorian thought on embodiment, scientific practice, and community. 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.

Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Oxford University Press and Penguin RandomHouse South Asia, 2025) by Dr. David Engerman recounts the work of six individuals, all former classmates at Cambridge University, who helped make international development--the effort to reduce poverty and inequality around the world--into a juggernaut of the second half of the twentieth century. International development employed millions, affected billions, and spent trillions; it held the hopes of the former colonies to create an economic independence to match their newfound political one, and the plans of wealthy counties to build an enduring economic order.The six Apostles in this book include some of South Asia's best-known names, like Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and long-serving Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as leading academics (Jagdish Bhagwati) and key policy-makers in both national and international circles. Taken together, this group both reflected and shaped the growing enterprise of international development from the time they left Cambridge in the mid-1950s well into the 2010s.For many years, the second half of the twentieth century was understood primarily through the lens of the Cold War. And yet, for the majority of the world, living in what was then called the Third World (and which is now called the Global South), development was a constant, while American-Soviet geopolitics only occasionally impinged upon their lives. And these six, as much as any other group, changed the way economists theorized development and aid officials practiced it. Their biographies, then, are the history of development.Based on newly available archival documents from 10 countries, and on interviews with four of the subjects, the widows of the other two, and almost 100 of their colleagues, friends, classmates, and rivals, this book combines riveting personal accounts with a sweeping history of one of the enduring human activities of the late 20th century and early 21st centuries: creating a more prosperous and equitable 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.

Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first chronological history of Soviet hippies, tracing their beginnings in the 1960s through the movement’s maturity and ritualization in the 1970s. It is also a rich analysis of key aspects of Soviet hippiedom, including ideology, kaif, materiality, and madness - both enacted and imposed. Flowers Through Concrete uncovers, in particular, the lost history of women who participated in the Soviet hippie movement. Fürst makes a number of important arguments in Flowers Through Concrete. Despite obvious antagonisms, she argues that Soviet hippies and late Soviet socialist reality meshed so well that a stable symbiotic, although hostile, relationship emerged. She asserts that personal evidence, such as oral history, is "one of the most exciting historical sources, whose weaknesses sometimes work for rather than against the historian". She engages seriously with and makes visible the role of her own authorial self-reflection in historical analysis. And, last but not least, as Fürst herself says, the story of Soviet hippies is a really good story.Amanda Jeanne Swain, PhD. Historian. Humanities Center executive director. Navigating academic systems with faculty and grad students.

A wargaming renaissance has been underway in the US military. Having proven to be the most effective recruitment tool of the 21st century, games have proliferated across all levels of the military's strategic, operational, training, and rehabilitation architecture. From board games to high-tech digital and virtual reality platforms, wargames enable milarites to learn lessons from the past, play out possible responses to current crises, and explore the effectiveness of future operations and strategies. From the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the Covid 19 pandemic, today wargames are a key means by which the US military--and many other militaries--make plans and fight wars. Politics of Play is the first academic book dedicated to the US military wargaming renaissance. Grounded in 100 hours of interviews undertaken by the author during fieldwork with US military wargamers, it explores how games intervene in players' cognitive and affective registers using immersion and the drive to win. In addition, Politics of Play develops a new theory of play grounded in the thought of Jacques Derrida which seeks to expose and disrupt the politics and power relations at work in the use of games to produce warfighters in the digital age.

Samuel K Cohn, Jr. joins Jana Byars to talk about Popular Protest and the Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford University Press, 2025). This work, now out in paper, is the first study to analyse popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. Drawing on over 100 contemporary chronicles and diaries, the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo's diplomatic dispatches, mercantile letters, and commentary, and 586 collective supplications scattered through archival sources from towns and villages in the Grand duchy of Milan, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. places these incidents and their patterns in comparative perspectives, first with the late medieval heyday of popular revolt and then with regions north of the Alps. Cohn finds new developments during the early modern period such as an increase in women rebels, mutinies of soldiers, and new tactics of revolts such as shop closures, peaceful demonstrations of strength, and use of religious processions for discussions of tactics and strategies for obtaining logistic advantage. At the same time, these protests show convergences with the medieval Italian past, with leaders coming almost exclusively from the ranks of nonelites, religious ideology playing a surprisingly minor role, and the majority of revolts centring overwhelming in towns and cities. Finally, this study demonstrates that democracies do not just die under the duress of military occupation and growing powers of autocratic regimes. Ideals of representation and equality not only persisted; they could emerge in new forms and with greater sophistication.

Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy Shacham showcases the groundbreaking worldview that this often-overlooked poem embodies. Krsnadevaraya (r.1509-1529) ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire during its heyday, and his monumental poem situates all power and authority not in the imperial center, but in the villages and temples at the empire's outskirts; not in the royal court, but in a religious community - a worldview radically different from how literary and political histories portray the king and his empire. Empire Inside Out: Religion, Conquest, and Community in Kṛṣṇadevarāya's Āmuktamālyada explores the Āmuktamālyada as a reflection of one of South Asia's most culturally complex periods, highlighting its rich religious, political, historical and ethnographic detail. Moreover, Loewy Shacham examines the Āmuktamālyada as the work of a king imparting personal insights on empire, kingship, and individuality - specifically, that it is possible to be unbounded by the institution of kingship that he himself embodies. This book demonstrates that Krsnadevaraya's text connects the imperial domain to the village and temple settings, and to the south Indian community of Srivaisnava devotees-and indeed that it situates the source of authority and power not in the royal court but in the margins, where Srivaisnavism originated, giving the far Tamil south a central role in its imperial vision. Employing close textual analysis of the Āmuktamālyada, supplemented by a rich corpus of texts in different languages and genres, Empire Inside Out illuminates a piece of literature that has been fairly neglected, owing to the particularized linguistic and literary training required. The core of the book is based in the historical context of sixteenth-century Vijayanagara, from which it moves to the various pasts that helped shape the Āmuktamālyada, and to our contemporary times and the use of the text in constructing (at times rewriting) history.

Even casual observers of the military will notice the unique ways that service members use language. With all of the acronyms and jargon, some even argue that membership in the military requires learning a whole language. But rather than treat military-specific language as a cultural difference of the institution or a technical requirement for the job, Dr. Janet McIntosh examines how military language works to enable its members to both kill and imagine themselves as killable. In her book Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics (Oxford UP, 2025), Dr. McIntosh explores how language is used first in military training to "toughen up" recruits; during combat overseas as a way to cope with death and killing; and then how this language is unlearned and repackaged by antiwar veterans as part of their own personal demilitarization. Janet McIntosh is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. She has received numerous awards of her previous work, including the Clifford Geertz Prize in the anthropology of religion, Honorable Mention in the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and an Honorable Mention in the American Ethnological Society Book Prize. Her current work has been supported through grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In this episode we mentioned the NBN interview with Ben Schrader about his book Fight to Live, Live to Fight. You can find a transcript of the interview here.

EPISODE SUMMARY: What becomes visible when you shift the lens away from Beijing to how China’s Belt and Road projects unfold on the ground? Seeing China’s Belt and Road, edited by Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey, answers this question by reorienting conversations on China’s global infrastructure development to their “downstream” effects. Instead of analyzing the BRI through grand geopolitical narratives or a national strategic lens, the book draws on fieldwork across Asia, Africa, and Latin America to show how local actors—mayors, contractors, migrant workers, and residents—shape and contest projects in practice. Contributing authors challenge simplified portrayals of the BRI as either neocolonial domination or benevolent development, instead revealing its fragmented, improvised, and negotiated nature. Our conversation touches on themes including the visual politics of infrastructure, how power flows through projects, and the agency of local people in shaping global connectivity. We also look ahead to emerging frontiers of China’s influence, including digital corridors and cleaner energy, offering a view of China’s evolving global presence. GUEST BIOS: Dr. Edward Schatz is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is interested in identity politics, social transformations, social movements, anti-Americanism, and authoritarianism with a focus on the ex-USSR, particularly Central Asia. His publications include Slow Anti-Americanism (Stanford UP, 2021), Paradox of Power (co-edited with John Heathershaw, U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017), Political Ethnography (edited, U. Chicago Press, 2009), Modern Clan Politics (U. Washington Press, 2004), as well as articles in Comparative Politics, Slavic Review, International Political Science Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and other academic journals. Current projects include a collaborative effort (with Rachel Silvey) to understand the downstream effects of China’s Belt & Road Initiative, as well as a book about the rise of shamelessness in global politics. Dr. Rachel Silvey is Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning. She is a Faculty Affiliate in CDTS, WGSI, and the Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a dual B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz in Environmental Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. Professor Silvey is best known for her research on women’s labour and migration in Indonesia. She has published widely in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development. Her major funded research projects have focused on migration, gender, social networks, and economic development in Indonesia; immigration and employment among Southeast Asian-Americans; migration and marginalization in Bangladesh and Indonesia; and religion, rights and Indonesian migrant women workers in Saudi Arabia.LINKS TO RESOURCES Seeing China’s Belt and Road: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/seeing-chinas-belt-and-road-9780197789261?cc=us&lang=en& Overview with contributing authors on Seeing China’s Belt and Road: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULuHvAhUV_4 The Rise of the Infrastructure State How US–China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-rise-of-the-infrastructure-state

Who are 'gifted' children? In ‘Gifted Children’ in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945 Jennifer Crane, a senior lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the social and cultural history of this category of young people. The book charts the individuals, organisations, policymakers, and media activities that aimed to identify children as ‘gifted’, lobbying for their social status and the potential benefit they might bring to both the UK and the rest of the world. At the same time, the book critically assesses the idea of 'gifted' children being closely intertwined with a range of social inequalities, reflecting Britain’s broader class, race, gender and disability hierarchies. Most crucially, the book draws on children’s voices, foregrounding their experiences of understanding, embracing, and resisting the 'gifted' label. At a time of renewed public debates over social and cultural hierarchies, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. It is available open access here. Jennifer Crane is lecturer in health geographies at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, working at the intersection of history, geography, and sociologies of health. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.