In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Are you a musical theatre fan who loves TikTok? Or are you curious about how this social media app has changed musical theatre fandom - and even the concept of the musical itself?TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age (Oxford UP, 2024) takes readers inside the world of TikTok Broadway, where fans create, expand, and canonize musical theatre through viral videos. It argues that TikTok democratizes musical theatre fan cultures and spaces, creating a new canon of musical theatre that reflects the preferences and passions of the fans. Readers will also see how TikTok Broadway influences other aspects of U.S. popular culture, from Broadway shows to TV adaptations.From Six and Beetlejuice to Wicked and Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, this book covers the most popular and innovative musical theatre content on TikTok. Author Trevor Boffone, a musical theatre scholar and a TikTok creator, shows how fans use the app to express their love for musical theatre, and how they collaborate to produce original works, such as Bridgerton: The Musical.TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age shows how the app puts power in the hands of the fans.

In Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced laborers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents. Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period. Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath. The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a program of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes.

Political Scientist E.J. Fagan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, once worked at a think tank, and has long been interested in the intersecting work of think tanks and politics. Thus, The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) is an outgrowth of Fagan’s academic research and experience. Think tanks, by their very nature, are generally creating information, knowledge, policy ideas, and the like, with the intention of influencing the policy that is made by elected officials. Those who work at think tanks are generally experts in particular policy areas, and they produce information. Think tanks are not academic institutions, and they are not part of political parties either. They are private organizations that can have policy influence on parties, candidates, and policy development. In The Thinkers, Fagan pays close attention to four think tanks that he explains are the most partisan among the hundreds of think tanks: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There are many other think tanks, and Fagan explains that these four have had the most direct engagement in developing policy that is then taken up by elected officials (members of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, the president and White House advisors, as well as governors and state-level elected officials.)The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics assesses the role of think tanks within partisan politics and the connections between these organizations and the policy outcomes we often see in presidential administrations and in Congress. The book also highlights a significant finding, that the rise of think tanks has contributed to the polarization within American politics. Fagan has the data to support this finding, noting that the increased influence of the think tanks, the issue areas where they are directing their work and research, and the increased polarization over the past few decades. The Thinkers teases out the connection between lawmakers and neutral experts—who tend to be academics doing research at colleges and universities, and those working at think tanks, who have interpolated between these two groups. This is an important part of the research on think tanks and how they operate, especially the think tanks that are more partisan and working closely to influence policy outcomes. Given the current focus on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, we also discussed how this is an example of the way that the more partisan think tanks engage in the policy development process, and how they hope to influence politicians and elected officials. The Thinkers is a fascinating study of American think tanks and their role and place within our political system.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 (University Press of Kansas, 2022), 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 can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 (Oxford UP, 2020), begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history: the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese. As in the first volume of Todman's epic account of British involvement in World War II ("Total history at its best," according to Jay Winter), he highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing on its inhabitants, its defenders, and its wartime leadership. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return. It also documents the full impact of the entrance into the war by the United States, and its ascendant stewardship of the war.Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 is a triumph of narrative and research. Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences--at home and abroad--of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain and the world.Bob Wintermute is professor of history at Queens College, CUNY.

Lise Butler’s Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70 (Oxford UP, 2020) invites us to revisit a figure who, in Butler’s words, is both a ‘relatively obscure’ yet also ‘curiously ubiquitous’ in the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain. The book uses Young, a policy maker and sociology to explore the role of social science in social democratic politics in the postwar period. Butler explores Young’s role in activities such as his role developing the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto ‘Let us Face the Future’, his work as a sociologist, most notably in his monograph Family and Kinship in East London (co-authored with Peter Wilmott), and his role as a social innovator helping to establish Institute of Community Studies, the Consumers' Association, Which? magazine, the Social Science Research Council and the Open University. In doing so she offers a thought provoking story which encourages rethinking some of the common assumptions made about the role of sociology, and social science more broadly, in British politics.In this podcast we explore the themes of the book, which includes not only discussing the above but also themes such as the role of women and the family in Young’s thought, why he favoured the basic income, the social scientific turn in the history of modern Britain and why, exactly, buying a fridge is a political act.Matt Dawson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow with research interests in social theory and the history of sociology.

During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift?Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilising agendas in favour of reasoned persuasion.Dr. Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

The Parashakthi Temple in Pontiac, Michigan serves as a site of worship for the Hindu goddess Karumariamman, whose origins are in South India. In her American home Karumariamman has assumed the status of Great Goddess, a tantric deity and wonder worker who communicates directly with devotees through dreams, visions, and miracles. Drawing on fifteen years of field work, Tracy Pintchman reveals how the Parashakthi Temple has become a site of theological and ritual innovation.A unique spiritual community, the temple does not simply reproduce Indian goddess traditions, but instead reimagines Hinduism and the Hindu Goddess in the American religious, cultural, and natural landscape. The congregation's faith is grounded in a vision of the Goddess as a breaker of boundaries, including those of race, ethnicity, religion, geography, history, and nationality. Like her congregants, Pintchman suggests, the goddess is emblematic of the qualities of a new immigrant; she embraces the opportunities her new home affords her and refashions herself, but she does not forget her roots, keeping one foot planted in her Indian homeland and another planted firmly in her new land, the United States.In Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple (Oxford UP, 2023), Pintchman considers larger issues concerning the creativity of immigrant Hindu communities and the ways in which diaspora contexts facilitate the production of new forms of Hinduism that are made possible by globalization and modern technology.

Whether it is pirates, smugglers, illicit fishing, or disputes in the South China Sea, the oceans are of increasing importance in international security.In Understanding Maritime Security (Oxford UP, 2024), Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds provide a concise introduction to the history of security at sea and explain the core frameworks of analysis that professionals use to understand and tackle challenges to maritime order. They discuss key issues within the maritime security agenda, including inter-state disputes, terrorism, piracy, smuggling, trafficking, and illicit fishing, and examine how states have responded.Bueger and Edmunds analyze future trends and show how maritime security is impacted by the critical infrastructure agenda, emerging technologies, cyber security, climate change, biodiversity loss, and the renaissance of geopolitics.Comprehensive and incisive, this primer of maritime security is essential reading for maritime security professionals and students of this increasingly important issue.Our guest today is Christian Bueger, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Business and Human Rights Law is a rapidly growing area of law, which has dramatically transformed many parts of international law. In this new volume in the Elements series, Robert McCorquodale explores how the responsibility for human rights abuses has transitioned from a purely state obligation to also being the responsibility of businesses. Business responsibility for human rights impacts have become subject both to legislation and to court decisions whenever their activities lead to human rights abuses anywhere in the world.Business and Human Rights (Oxford UP, 2024) shows the importance of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in these developments, and examines their influence on international, regional, and national law. It also analyses the changes on state obligations to protect human rights, on the corporate responsibility for human rights abuses, and on effective access to remedies for those adversely affected by business activities. Each of these shifts has consequences on core tenets of international law, such as sovereignty and jurisdiction, and has implications for crafting new international law in areas such as climate change and technology.Robert is a member of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, and brings his decades of experience in scholarship and legal practice in business and human rights law, as well as his extensive engagement with businesses, governments, civil society, and international organisations, to bear on his understanding and analysis of this increasingly important field.Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. His University of Leeds profile page can be found here. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedInHis recent publications include: “Cambodia and the progressivist ‘imaginary’: The limitations of international(ised) criminal tribunals as mechanisms for implementing human rights” in Louisa Ashley and Nicolette Butler (eds), The Incoherence of Human Rights in International Law: Absence, Emergence and Limitations (Routledge, 2024 ISBN13: 978-1-032638-03-4) “‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2024 ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5) "Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3) “International Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers" (2021) Journal of International Criminal Justice 19(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387)

The problems that gave rise to the widespread desire to introduce a common currency were myriad. While trade was able to cope with-and even to benefit from-the parallel circulation of many different types of coin, it nevertheless harmed both the common people and the political authorities. The authorities in particular suffered from neighbours who used their comparatively good money as raw material to mint poor imitations. Debasing their own coinage provided an, at best, short-term solution. Over the medium and long term, it drove the members of the Empire into rounds of competitive debasements, until they realised that a common currency was the only answer that addressed the core of the problem.In The Silver Empire: How Germany Created Its First Common Currency (Oxford University Press, 2024) Dr. Oliver Volckart examines the conditions that shaped the monetary outlook of the member states of the Empire, paying particular attention to the uneven access to silver and gold. Following closely the negotiations that prepared the common currency, he is able to illuminate the interest groups that were formed, what their agendas and ulterior motives were, how alliances were forged, and how it was eventually possible to obtain majority agreement on what a common currency should look like: a silver-based currency that was introduced in 1559-66.In fact, in contrast to what historians once believed, the common currency they achieved turns out to have functioned not significantly worse than other currencies of the time: it had similar problems and similar advantages as the money issued by more centralised governments.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.