In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the importance of Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity through the lenses of performance, entertainment, and spectacle. Laura Lieber proposes an account of hymnody as a performative and theatrical genre, combining religious and theatrical studies to examine how performers creatively engaged their audiences, utilized different modes of performance, and created complex characters through their speeches.To truly consider performance and engage with these poems fully, Lieber urges readers to imagine the world beyond the page. While poetry and hymnody from Late Antiquity are usually presented in textual form, Lieber moves away from studying the text on its own, engaging instead with how these poems would have been performed and acted. The specific literary techniques associated with oratory and acting in Late Antiquity, such as apostrophe and vivid imagery, help craft a more accurate idea of liturgical presentations. Lieber suggests ways that these ancient poets could have used their physical spaces of performance by borrowing from the gestures and body language of oratory, mime, and pantomime.A highly interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars across religion, theatre, literature, and beyond, Staging the Sacred proposes a novel interpretation of Late Antique hymnody and poetry as a performative genre, akin to oratory, theatre, and other modes of public performance, placing these works in their wider societal context.New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.Laura S. Lieber is the inaugural chair and Professor of the Transregional History of Religion at the University of Regensburg in Germany.Michael Motia in a Lecturer in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

The New Testament and the Theology of Trust (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the recovery of trust as a central theme in Christian theology, and offers the first theology of trust in the New Testament.'Trust' is the root meaning of Christian 'faith' (pistis, fides), and trusting in God and Christ is still fundamental to Christians. But unlike faith, and other aspects of faith such as belief or hope, trust is little studied. Building on her ground-breaking study Roman Faith and Christian Faith, and drawing on the philosophy and psychology of trust, Teresa Morgan explores the significance of trust, trustworthiness, faithfulness, and entrustedness in New Testament writings.Trust between God, Christ, and humanity is revealed as a risky, dynamic, forward-looking, life-changing partnership. God entrusts Christ with winning the trust of humanity and bringing humanity to trust in God. God and Christ trust humanity to respond to God's initiative through Christ, and entrust the faithful with diverse forms of work for humanity and for creation. Human understanding of God and Christ is limited, and trust and faithfulness often fail, but imperfect trust is not a deal-breaker.Morgan develops a new model of atonement, showing how trust enables humanity's release from the power of both sin and suffering. She examines the neglected concept of propositional trust and argues that it plays a key role in faith. This volume offers a compelling vision of Christian trust as soteriological, ethical, and community-forming. Trust is both the means of salvation and an end in itself, because where we trust is where we most fully live.Teresa Morgan studied classics at Cambridge University, theology at Oxford, and violin and viola in London and Cologne. She joined Yale Divinity School in 2022, from Oxford University. Professor Morgan writes across Greek and Roman history, the New Testament, and early Christianity, especially on Greek, Roman, and early Christian ethics (e.g. Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire, 2007), Greek and Roman education (Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, 1998), and Paul (Being ‘in Christ’ in the Letters of Paul: Saved Through Christ and In His Hands, 2020). She is currently coming to the end of a four-volume investigation of the historical evolution, early religious meaning, and contemporary significance of ancient Mediterranean and early Christian trust and faith (Roman Faith and Christian Faith, 2015, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust, 2022, Trust in Atonement (2024), and The Invention of Faith (forthcoming). When this is finished, she plans to return to ethics with a study of the evolution of Christian ethics in the first four centuries CE.Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity.You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 (Oxford University Press, 2023) argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays—plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars—in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past.Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, Dr. Marissa Nicosia shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.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 Search for Shelter: Writings on Land and Housing (Oxford UP, 2022) sheds light on the global population living in slums, which has increased from 1 billion in 2014 to 1.6 billion in 2018. The book also looks at the impact of neoliberalism on urban planning, the manner of organization and the struggles of the communities affected by these processes, the cultural and political decision-making processes of the State, and their repercussions on the form and life of the city. In this book, Arif Hasan discusses the conflicts between ground realities, academic theory, governmental policies, and international interventions in the shelter sector. With the help of individual case studies, he goes into depths of the various issues faced, and in certain instances also gives recommendations to improve upon the situation.

How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960-2022 (Oxford University Press, 2023) provides a more comprehensive and meaningful periodization of the commercialization of documentary film. Although the commercial ascension of documentary films might seem meteoric, it is the culmination of decades-long efforts that have developed and fortified the audience for documentary features.Author Nora Stone refines rough explanations of these efforts through a robust synoptic history of the market for documentary films, using knowledge of film economics and the norms of industry discourse to tell a richer story. This periodization will allow scholars to compare the commercialization of documentary film with other genres. Drawing on archival documents, industry trade journals and popular press, and interviews with filmmakers and film distributors, Stone illuminates how documentary features have become more plentiful, popular, and profitable than ever before.Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories.

Katharine Sykes joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Symbolic Representation in Early Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2024). In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical. Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

This year, many countries around the world, including most of the world's most populous democracies, have consequential nation-wide elections. In many of these elections, democracy itself is at stake. The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023) is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, Samuel Ely Bagg explains why we should shift our orientation away from maximizing collective self-rule and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Bagg argues we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture - a vision that is at once more realistic and, he argues, more inspiring. The book presents an ambitious and comprehensive engagement with democracy's foundations, principles, and practices. Make no mistake, this work of political theory is profoundly worldly: it bears reading for those interested in politics across time, space, and scale - from the reconstruction US to contemporary Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela. Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches courses in political theory. Before coming to UofSC, he taught at the University of Oxford, McGill University, and Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2017.Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. His recent publications include co-edited volumes on Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).

Historically, the insurance industry in America has been fragmented. As a result, there have been debates and conflicts over the proper roles of federal and state governments, business, and the responsibilities of individuals. Who should cover the risks of loss? And to what extent should risk be shared and by whom?In Uncovered: The Story of Insurance in America (Oxford UP, 2023), Katherine Hempstead answers these questions by exploring the history of the insurance business and its regulation in the United States from the 1870s through the twentieth century. Specifically, she focuses on the friction between the public demand for insurance and the private imperatives of insurers. Tracing the history of the industry from the early days of life, fire, and casualty insurance to the development of state regulation in the late nineteenth century, Hempstead examines the role that insurers initially played in the largely voluntary social safety net and how this changed over time. After the Great Depression, the federal government assumed a greater role in the provision of insurance, while insurers enthusiastically pursued the growing business of employee benefits. As the twentieth century progressed, insurers and government have become interdependent, with insurers participating in publicly funded markets. As Hempstead shows, periodic crises in life, fire, health, auto, and liability insurance highlighted gaps between the coverage that insurers were willing to provide and what the public demanded.

Earlier histories of the Cold War haven’t exactly been charitable toward the peace activists and pacifists who led peace initiatives. Pacifists in the United States were either simplistic and naïve, or they were fellow travelers of the Soviet Union. Peace proposals coming from the Soviet Union were nothing more than propaganda. Activists in Europe, meanwhile, were treated as a kind of curiosity in the broader Cold War, but their role was to highlight the growing tensions between the superpowers. This left an important question unanswered: what exactly was the significance of this peace activism that emerged after 1945? Did it amount to anything?Petra Goedde’s The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019) fills in the important history of peace movements during the Cold War. Goedde discusses the different movements that existed in the United States and Europe from 1945 until the early 1970s. She looks at different facets of these peace movements. Much of it is centered on opposition to nuclear weapons, but Goedde’s analysis extends into the realm of decolonization, environmentalism, and gender. She concludes by noting some of the long-term impacts of peace activism, including the formation of the Green Party in Germany and the adoption of certain policies by foreign policy realists such as Richard Nixon.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.