In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

In this sweeping new biography, Colin G. Calloway, John Kimball Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, uses the prism of George Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time—Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle—and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America’s founding. The Indian World of George Washington (Oxford University Press, 2018) spans decades of Native American leaders’ interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic’s destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country. The Indian World of George Washington offers a fresh portrait of the most revered American and the Native Americans whose story has been only partially told. Calloway’s biography invites us to look again at the history of America’s beginnings and see the country in a whole new light. Ryan Tripp teaches history at several community colleges, universities, and online extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

My guest today is Christian Miller. Christian is A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University.  He is a moral philosopher specializing on character, with special interest in the empirical study of the virtues and vices. He currently directs The Beacon Project, which studies morally exemplars; and he has recently completed a 5-year research project called The Character Project.  His latest book is titled The Character Gap: How Good Are We?  (Oxford University Press, 2017) Moral thinking and evaluation often occur at the level of the person.  We find ourselves asking not simply “What ought I do?” but “Who should I be?”  Similarly, in assessing others, we tend to evaluate their behavior be means of concepts that ascribe to them character traits of various kinds–these are virtue and vice concepts such as generous, untrustworthy, timid, honest, and so on.  A long tradition going back at least as far as Aristotle takes the person’s character to be the fundamental item of moral evaluation.  But an equally long tradition wonders what, exactly, character is.  And, more recently, experimental studies of human behavior have given reason to wonder whether there is such a thing as a person’s character at all. In The Character Gap, Christian Miller reviews the philosophical and psychological material pertaining to character.  Miller defends the thesis that although there is such a thing as character, most of us lack both the virtues and the vices. I hope you enjoy the interview.

From Stalin’s inner circle to Soviet dinner menus, the small nation of Georgia had a remarkable influence on the politics and culture of the USSR. Erik Scott, author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (Oxford University Press, 2016), traces how Georgians came to occupy such a central role in Soviet history, as well as how the relationship with Moscow unraveled. Scott argues that the Soviet Union should be seen as an “empire of diasporas”: though assigned to titular republics, Soviet nationalities were mobile, mixed freely, and gained prominence in the center. In a system that elevated national repertoires, performing “otherness” could be a successful integration strategy. Scott argues that Georgians were perhaps the ideal “familiar strangers”—highly educated, densely networked, and fluent in Russian culture, while also boasting a language unintelligible to outsiders and a unique performance tradition. Scott follows the political networks that elevated Georgian revolutionaries from the Caucasus to the Kremlin, where Stalin presided as “toastmaster-in-chief,” followed by the spread of Georgian food and dining customs to Soviet tables. The book also explores Georgians’ role in Thaw-era song and dance and the informal economy of the Brezhnev era. Ultimately, the Georgian intelligentsia grew disillusioned with the Soviet power that both supported and constricted them, as manifested in the hugely popular perestroika-era film Repentance. With the collapse, Georgians and other “familiar strangers” transformed from internal diasporas to transnational populations living across state borders; while their numbers in Moscow grew, they faced entirely new sets of challenges. Familiar Strangers is the finalist for the Council for European Studies Book Award, the Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award, and the Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies. It is now out in paperback. Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture.

In Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2018), Karen Teoh relates the history of English and Chinese girls’ schools that overseas Chinese founded and attended from the 1850s to the 1960s in British Malaya and Singapore. She examines the strategies of missionaries, colonial authorities, and Chinese reformists and revolutionaries for educating girls, as well as the impact that this education had on identity formation among overseas Chinese women and larger society. These schools would help to produce what society ‘needed’, in the form of better wives and mothers, or workers and citizens of developing nation-states, while ensuring compliance with desired ideals. Chinese women in diaspora found that failing to conform to any number of state priorities could lead to social disapproval, marginalization, or even outright deportation. Through vivid oral histories, and by bridging Chinese and Southeast Asian history, British imperialism, gender, and the history of education, Schooling Diaspora shows how these diasporic women contributed to the development of a new figure: the educated transnational Chinese woman. Karen M. Teoh is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Stonehill College (Massachusetts). Her research focuses on Chinese migration and diaspora from the 17th century to the present, and examines how changing notions of gender roles, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity have shaped the identities of groups and individuals. Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World.

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his most important compositions including the Symphony of Psalms and Persephone. Dr. Kimberly A. Francis has recently published two books related to the complicated and tangled relationship between these two people. The first, released in 2015 by Oxford University Press, is Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon. Just last month, Boydell and Brewer published Francis’s edition of their letters in Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence. In other hands, Teaching Stravinsky might have been a simple joint biography, but Francis grounds her work within a theoretical framework that promotes a new approach to musicology and other fields. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on cultural production, Francis reminds us that as long as musicologists insist on centering their scholarship on the lone composer/genius, someone who is almost always a man, we will miss how creative works are really a result of the complex interplay of networks of influence, and collaborators who participated in individual composers’ lives and music. She positions Boulanger as a participant in the cultural field of musical modernism, who used her position to influence Stravinsky’s compositions while also promoting and shaping his reputation as the premiere neo-classicist composer. At the center of Teaching Stravinsky is the long correspondence between Stravinsky, members of his family, and Boulanger which spans over forty years. In Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinkys, Francis edits and provides the English translation of most of the letters exchanged by the two friends providing readers not only the source material for her own work, but also an important resource for anyone interested in twentieth-century music. Both books have extensive companion websites. Perhaps most exciting in the Teaching Stravinsky website are the reproductions of pages from Stravinksy’s scores containing Boulanger’s comments with Francis’s explanations. The companion site for Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys holds all the letters in their original French. Kimberly A. Francis is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Guelph in Canada. Her work centers on twentieth and twenty-first century music and feminist musicology. She has published articles in many journals including The Musical Quarterly, Women and Music, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her work has been recognized many times with awards such as a Glen Haydon Award for her dissertation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, and the American Musicological Society’s Paul A. Pisk Prize and Teaching Fund Award. She was an International Fellow with the American Association of University Women. Her research has been supported by multiple grants including a General Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (20112013). She also serves as Editor-in Chief for the University of Guelph’s award-winning journal, Critical Voices: The University of Guelph Book Review Project.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is the author of Politics at Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers into Lobbyists (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University. We often think of corporate political power expressed in campaign donations, political advertising, and lobbying. Darrell West, Ray LaRaja and Brian Schaffner, and Erica Fowler have all been on the podcast in the past to talk about this side of money and politics. Hertel-Fernandez is focused elsewhere to discover how companies influence politics. He sets his sights on the internal politicking that companies engage in with their own employees. Through rigorous surveys and interviews, he discovers that a quarter of American employees have experienced some type of political influence from their employer, including encouragements to register to vote and pressure to vote for favored candidates. And once contacted by an employer, many employees feels pressured to act, sometimes out of fear of retribution, docked pay, or dismissal from the job. While this is hardly a brand new corporate tactic, Hertel-Fernandez explains how it has grown since the 1990s and also why this is a worrisome trend for the democracy and employees.

Deondra Rose has written Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is an assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Citizens by Degree examines the development and impact of federal higher education policy, specifically the National Defense Education Act, the Higher Education Act, and Title IX. Rose argues that these policies have been an overlooked-factor driving the progress that women have made in the United States. By significantly expanding women’s access to college, they led to women to surpassing men as the recipients of bachelor’s degrees, while also empowering them to become more economically successful and politically engaged. The book focuses on how Southern Democrats shaped U.S. higher policy development during the mid-twentieth century, expanding opportunities for women, while maintaining discriminatory practices for African Americans.

As a believer in free thought, a campaigner for women’s rights, and as a supporter of abolition, Ernestine Rose had no shortage of causes to advocate. In The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (Oxford University Press, 2017), Bonnie Anderson explores the life of a remarkable 19th-century activist who dedicated herself to changing society for the better. Even as a young girl growing up in Russian-occupied Poland, Rose questioned the limitations imposed her by the beliefs of her time. As a teenager, she resisted the demands of her community and set out on her own by moving to Berlin. From there she made her way to London, where she encountered Robert Owen and embraced his philosophy. Upon her move to the United States in 1836 she became a public speaker and activist, working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and others to change public opinion and advance reform. Though Rose saw her efforts to end slavery vindicated with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, ill health forced her to return to England just a few years later, where she continued to campaign for women’s suffrage up to the end of her long life.

When the state takes over, can local democracy survive? Over 100 school districts have been taken over by state governments since the late 1980s. In doing so, state officials relieve local officials, including those elected by local residents, of the authority to operate public schools. In cities with an increasingly powerful group of African-American leaders, a state takeover has the potential to roll-back gains in descriptive representation and democratic governance. How this has played out is the purpose of Domingo Morel‘s new book, Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Morel focuses on two cities, Central Falls, RI and Newark, NJ, as well as original quantitative data from cities across the country. What he discovers is a very real threat to local democracy, but one that has played out different ways. The case of Newark differs greatly from Central Falls, and Morel shows what we can learn about racial and ethnic politics by focusing on the changing ways that schools are operated. Morel is assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University, Newark.

Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford University Press, 2017) by Fareen Parvez is a rich ethnographic analysis of Islamic Revival movements in France (Lyon) and India (Hyderabad). In her study, Parvez maps the complex ways in which Muslims, especially women, engage in religious and political activism in secular states where they are minorities. Her study challenges many notions of secularity and political Islam, particularly as it intersects with complex class identities (i.e., those who are marginalized socio-economically) both in India and France. Moving through everyday spaces, such as schools (Islamic and secular), conferences, mosques, and cafes, Parvez’s study attunes us to the intricate realities of women’s political and religious activism. This study is of great importance to scholars invested in minority and Muslim politics in India and France, as well those working on secularism, Muslim women, and political Islam, while Parvez’s ethnographic methodologies and reflections would be of great value for those working in anthropology. M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 201800) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at mxavier@ithaca.edu.