In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford UP, 2024). An expert in constitutional law, Pozen argues that the drug war has been an unmitigated disaster, in terms of money, efficacy, and human rights. But even as activists peel off the drug war’s more unsavory aspects through cannabis and psychedelic legalization, Pozen also argues that they’ve neglected to consider the impact America’s courts could have on rectifying oppressive drug laws.It wasn’t always this way. The Constitution of the War on Drugs also details the “hidden history” of a brief legal moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when lawyers effectively argued for liberalized drug policies – on the sound basis of the Constitution. The moment was eventually overturned, but Pozen argues it could be a useful historical lesson for people interested in the effects of constitutional law on the drug war today.A link to the digital edition of The Constitution of the War on Drugs will soon be available here.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is coming out soon from the University of Chicago Press.

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come.Across the globe, people dependent on digital technologies have become increasingly alarmed that their rapid adoption and transformation have ushered in an exceedingly concentrated economy where a few powerful companies control vast economic wealth and political power, undermine data privacy, and widen the gap between economic winners and losers. In response, world leaders are variously embracing the idea of reining in the most dominant tech companies. Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches―the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model―and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear.Digital societies are at an inflection point. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies.Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

J.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) describes the work of one of the most important and under-studied theologians in the history of Christianity. In the late 1820s, John Nelson Darby abandoned his career as a priest in the Church of Ireland to become one of the principal leaders of a small but rapidly growing religious movement that became known as the "Plymouth Brethren." Darby and other brethren modified the Calvinism that was common among their evangelical contemporaries, developing distinctive positions on key doctrines relating to salvation, the church, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the end times.After his death in 1882, Darby's successors revised and expanded his arguments, and Darby became known as the architect of the most influential system of end-times thinking among the world's half-a-billion evangelicals. This "dispensational premillennialism" exercises extraordinary influence in religious communities, but also in popular culture and geopolitics. But claims that Darby created this theological system may need to be qualified -for all his innovation, this reputation might be undeserved. This book reconstructs Darby's theological development and argues that his innovations were more complex and extensive than their reduction into dispensationalism might suggest. In fact, Darby's thought might be closer to that of his Reformed critics than to that of modern exponents of dispensationalism.Crawford Gribben is Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast.Caleb Zakarin is editor at New Books Network.

What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human (Oxford UP, 2024) is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Darwin and Spencer. Author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in light of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought.In this book, Piilonen delves into how historical evolutionists, in particular Darwin and Spencer, developed and applied a concept of music that served as a boundary-drawing device, used to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. She takes as primary texts the early evolutionary treatises that double as theoretical accounts of music's origins. For Darwin, music served as a kind of proto-language common to humans and animals alike; he heard the songs of birds and the chirps of mice as musical, as articulated in texts such as The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Spencer, on the other hand, viewed music as a specifically human stage of evolutionary advance, beyond language acquisition, as outlined in his essay, "The Origin and Function of Music" (1857). These competing views established radically different perspectives on the origin and function of music in human cultural expression, while at the same time being mutually constitutive of one another.A ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, Theorizing Music Evolution turns to music evolution with an eye toward disrupting and intervening in these questions as they recur in the present.”Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

Seamus O’Malley is an associate professor at Yeshiva University. His first book was Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2015). He has co-edited three volumes, one of essays on Ford Madox Ford and America (Rodopi, 2010), a research companion to Ford (Routledge, 2018) and a volume of essays on the cartoonists Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (Mississippi, 2018). He is the chair of the Ford Madox Ford Society and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies.In this interview he discusses his new book, Irish Culture and "The People": Populism and Its Discontents (Oxford UP, 2022), a study of the rhetoric of populism and uses of the seemingly simple concept “The People” in Irish political and literary discourse.Irish Culture and ‘The People’ argues that populism has been a shaping force in Irish literary culture. Populist moments and movements have compelled authors to reject established forms and invent new ones. Sometimes, as in the middle period of W.B. Yeats's work, populism forces a writer into impossible stances, spurring ever greater rhetorical and poetic creativity. At other times, as in the critiques of Anna Parnell or Myles na gCopaleen, authors penetrate the rhetoric fog of populist discourse and expose the hollowness of its claims. Yet in both politics and culture, populism can be a generative force. Daniel O'Connell, and later the Land League, utilized populist discourse to advance Irish political freedom and expand rights. The most powerful works of Lady Gregory and Ernie O'Malley are their portraits of The People that borrows from the populist vocabulary. While we must be critical of populist discourse, we dismiss it at our loss. This study synthesizes existing scholarship on populism to explore how Irish texts have evoked "The People"--a crucial rhetorical move for populist discourse--and how some writers have critiqued, adopted, and adapted the languages of Irish populisms.Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

China’s communist revolution has an intricate relationship with gender and religion. In Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023), Xiaofei Kang moves the two themes to the center stage in the Chinese Revolution. It examines the Communist Party’s first anti-superstition campaign in its wartime headquarters of Yan’an, the holy land of the Maoist revolution. The book argues that religion was not a mere adversary for the revolution; it also served as a model with which the Party mobilized support and constructed legitimacy. In its rise from rural backwaters to national dominance, the Party attacked “superstitions” that had supported the foundations of Chinese religious life. At the same time, Party propaganda co-opted the same religious resources for its own political ends. In this parallel and often paradoxical process, the persuasive power of Party propaganda relied heavily on recasting the cosmic forces of yin and yang that sustained the traditional gender hierarchy and ritual order. Furthermore, revolutionary art and literature revamped old narratives of female ghosts and ritual exorcism to inject the people with a new hegemonic vision of the Party-state endowed with both scientific potency and the heavenly mandate. Gendered language and symbolism in Chinese religion thus remained central to inspiring pathos, ethos, and logos for the revolution. The interplay of religion, gender, and revolution holds historical and contemporary significance of the Maoist legacy in contemporary China. It also offers insights into the transformative power of propaganda in global politics.Xiaofei Kang is Professor in the Department of Religion at the George Washington University. Her research focuses on gender, ethnicity, and Chinese religions in traditional and modern China. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2006). She co-authored (with Donald S. Sutton) Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (Brill, 2016), and co-edited (with Jia Jinhua and Ping Yao) Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity and Body (SUNY Press, 2014).Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

The concept of the puruṣa, or person, is implicated in a wide range of ancient texts throughout the Indian subcontinent. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, Matthew I. Robertson traces the development of this concept from 1500 BCE to 400 CE: in the Ṛg Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, the Upaniṣads, Buddhist Pāli suttas, the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitā, and the Mahābhārata. Pushing back against the interpretation of personhood as a cosmological microcosm, Robertson argues instead that, in these texts, personhood and the “world” (loka) are interrelated concepts. He investigates how persons were understood to expand to the fill the horizons of their world, attending to ritual-political, aesthetic, yogic, and medicinal techniques deployed for this purpose.

In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world.The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire to appear in over a generation. Covering political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy, Anthony Kaldellis's volume is divided into ten chronological sections which begin with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and end with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The book incorporates new findings, explains recent interpretive models, and presents well-known historical characters and events in a new light.Dr. Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. His previous books include A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities; Streams of gold, Rivers of Blood; Romanland, and, as translator and editor, Prokopios’ The Secret History. In 2019, he began hosting the podcast “Byzantium & Friends.”Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.

Before Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international organisations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it refused to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other major agencies beyond the Security Council and General Assembly, casting them as foreign meddlers. Under new leadership, the USSR joined UNESCO and a slew of international organisations for the first time, including the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. As a result, it enabled Soviet diplomats, scholars, teachers, and even some blue-collar workers to participate in global discussions on topics ranging from their professional specialties to worldwide problems.Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Louis Porter investigates Soviet relations with one of the most prominent of these organisations, UNESCO, to present a novel way of thinking about the role of the United Nations in the Soviet experience of the Cold War. Drawing on unused archival material from the former USSR and elsewhere, the book examines the forgotten stories of Soviet citizens who contributed to the nuts-and-bolts operations and lesser-known activities of world governance. These unexamined dimensions of everyday participation in the UN's bureaucracy, conferences, publications, and technical assistance show the body's importance for a group of Soviet "one-worlders," who used the UN to imagine and work for a better world amidst the realities of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev governments sought to use their participation as a means of spreading Soviet influence within Western-dominated international organisations but discovered that this required risk-taking and a degree of openness for which the Soviet leadership and domestic institutions were often unprepared.Moving beyond debates over the successes and failures of UN diplomatic activities, Reds in Blue offers fresh perspectives on how Soviet citizens became citizens of the world and advocated for opening up Soviet society in ways that transcended Cold War categories without abandoning a sense of loyalty to their homeland. In doing so, it recaptures a space where East and West worked together towards a future without international conflict in the years before détente.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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.

How has the participation of women in Hindu nationalist politics in India changed over time? More broadly, what has their changing participation meant for women, Hindu nationalism, and Indian democracy? In Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Rina Verma Williams places women's participation in religious politics in India into historical and comparative perspective through a focus on the most important Hindu nationalist political parties in modern Indian history: the All-India Hindu Mahasabha (HMS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She compares three critical periods to show the increasing involvement of women in Hindu nationalist politics over time. In its formative years in the early 1900s, the HMS marginalized women; in the 1980s, the BJP began to mobilize them; and in the contemporary period, as the BJP returned to power in 2014, it has incorporated women into its structures and activities. Williams contends that the incorporation of women into Hindu nationalist politics has significantly advanced the BJP's electoral success compared to prior periods when women were either marginalized or mobilized in more limited ways. Given that the BJP is one of the most dynamic religious/ethno-nationalist parties in the world at present, Williams' account of how it incorporated masses of women into its coalition is essential reading for scholars and students interested not just in India, but in the relationship between gender and right-wing populist politics globally.Yash Sharma is a PhD student in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: sharmaym@mail.uc.edu