Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, Yosefa Raz's book The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2023) reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship's development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, while on the other, poets drew upon a counter-tradition of destabilizing, indeterminate, weak prophetic power. Yosefa Raz considers British and German Romanticism alongside their margins, incorporating Hebrew literature written at the turn of the twentieth century in the Russia Empire. Ultimately she explains the weakness of modern poet-prophets not only as a crisis of secularism but also, strikingly, as part of the instability of the biblical text itself.

The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land and wages. The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. James Fisher reveals that it was also about books, knowledge and expertise. It argues that during the early modern period, farming books were a key tool in the appropriation of the traditional art of husbandry possessed by farm workers of all kinds. It challenges the dominant narrative of an agricultural 'enlightenment', in which books merely spread useful knowledge, by showing how codified knowledge was used to assert greater managerial control over land and labour. The proliferation of printed books helped divide mental and manual labour to facilitate emerging social divisions between labourers, managers and landowners. The cumulative effect was the slow enclosure of customary knowledge. By synthesising diverse theoretical insights, this study opens up a new social history of agricultural knowledge and reinvigorates long-term histories of knowledge under capitalism.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.

Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities otherwise deemed marginal in historical scholarship: the Jazira region, the borderlands of today’s Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; the mobile peoples within this region, from nomadic pastoralists to deportees and refugees; and locusts. Sam Dolbee’s research traces the movements of people and insects within this region, and how the social “problem” of mobile peoples and the environmental problem of pests were conflated in the eyes of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman states. Following the path of the locust across this region reveals how the desert of the Jazira and its inhabitants were bordered, transformed by, and participated in both environmental and political projects.

What if the original teachings of Jesus were different from the Bible's sanitized 'orthodox' version? What covert motivations might inspire those who decide what the text of the Bible 'says' or what it 'means'? For some who ask conspiratorial questions like these, the Bible is the vulnerable victim of secular forces seeking to divest the USA of its founding identity. For others, the biblical canon suppresses religious truths that could upend the status quo. Such suspicions surrounding the Bible find full expression in Gospel Thrillers: a 1960s fictional genre that endures and still commands a substantial following. These novels imagine a freshly discovered first-century gospel and a race against time to unlock its buried secrets. They also reflect the fears and desires that the Bible continues to generate. In Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible (Cambridge UP, 2023), Andrew Jacobs reveals, in his authoritative examination, how this remarkable fictional archive opens a window onto disturbing biblical anxieties.New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew ReviewFind more information on the Gospel Thrillers here.Andrew Jacobs is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and the Editor of Cambridge University Press’s book series Element of Religion in Late Antiquity. His Epiphanius of Cyprus: a cultural biography of Late Antiquity (UC Press, 2016), won the Philip Schaff Best Book prize from the American Society of Church History. Andrew has also just finished a stint as President of the North American Patristics Society. Find him at @drewjackeprof.bsky.social, or on X: @drewjackeprofMichael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston. @mikemotia

In this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023).In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.

Swapnil Rai’s book Networked Bollywood: How Star Power Globalized Hindi Cinema (Cambridge UP, 2024) brilliantly navigates the intricate landscapes of stardom, shedding light on its diverse meanings amidst the ever-evolving new media industries and the demands of a globally interconnected audiences. With a keen focus on the global south, she masterfully explores the intersection of transnational networked cultures with the dynamic tapestry of media industries, geopolitics, and audience engagement.Dr. Swapnil Rai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she works at the intersection of media studies, critical cultural communication, women’s and gender studies, and industry studies. She has published her scholarship in a range of journals such as Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, Media, Culture and Society among others.Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached here.

In our interview, I spoke with Donald Stoker about the changes in American grand strategy over the past 250 years and the major themes from his new book: Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024).Across the full span of the nation’s history, Stoker challenges our understanding of the purposes and uses of American power. From the struggle for independence to the era of renewed competition with China and Russia, he reveals the grand strategies underpinning the nation’s pursuit of sovereignty, security, expansion, and democracy abroad. He shows how successive administrations have projected diplomatic, military, and economic power, and mobilized ideas and information to preserve American freedoms at home and secure US aims abroad. He exposes the myth of American isolationism, the good and ill of America’s quest for democracy overseas, and how too often its administrations have lacked clear political aims or a concrete vision for where they want to go. Understanding this history is vital if America is to relearn how to use its power to meet the challenges ahead and to think more clearly about political aims and grand strategy.The interview reflects the opinions of the author and not that of the US government or National Defense University.Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

In The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market. Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today.

Plato is a philosophical writer of unusual and ingenious versatility. His works engage in argument but are also full of allegory, imagery, myth, paradox and intertextuality. He astutely characterises the participants whom he portrays in conversation. Sometimes he composes fictive dialogues in dramatic form while at other times he does so as narratives. In How Plato Writes: Perspectives and Problems (Cambridge UP, 2023), world-renowned scholar Malcolm Schofield illustrates the variety of the literary resources that Plato deploys to achieve his philosophical purposes. He draws key passages for discussion particularly, but not only, from Republic and the less well-known Laws and also shows how reconstructing the original historical context of a dialogue and of its assumed readership is essential to understanding Plato's approach. The book will open the eyes of readers of all levels of expertise to Plato's masterly ability as a writer and how an understanding of this is crucial if we are to appreciate his philosophy.Malcolm Schofield is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge UniversityMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish-Soviet War. In Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2018), William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history. Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elite. The pogroms raged against the conscious will of new Poland's governors whilst Christians high and low sometimes sought, even successfully, to block them.