Episodi

  • Russell McCutcheon, "Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, second edition" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Russell McCutcheon, "Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, second edition" (Oxford UP, 2026)
    May 4 2026
    First published in 1997, Manufacturing Religion was a controversial book because it critiqued a widely adopted style of scholarship that presumes that religion is utterly unique, inexplicable, and therefore able only to be interpreted by privileged scholars. Claiming religion to be sui generis (or self-caused), this approach has undisclosed practical effects--institutional and geo-political--at a variety of sites, from the types of textbooks commonly used in introductory classes to the way that political events are often represented in the mass media. Russell McCutcheon documented the ubiquity of this approach and showed how harmful it was Updating its wide-ranging evidence and adding new chapters, this new edition demonstrates the impact of this critique while showing how little the field has generally moved in the past thirty years. Russell T. McCutcheon earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and is now an honorary life member of the International Association for the History of Religions. Beginning in 2001, he was the Department Chair at the University of Alabama, a role that he played for 18 years. His many publications on the history of the field and the practical effects of the category religion in liberal democracies, along with a number of resources created specifically for teachers and students, are widely used in the field today. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com00:00
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    47 min
  • Alice Echols, "Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Alice Echols, "Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic" (Oxford UP, 2026)
    May 3 2026
    A rich history of cross-racial coalitions and alliances of the Sixties' freedom movement, acclaimed historian Alice Echols's Black Power, White Heat reshapes our understanding of the entire era. One of the most divisive issues in recent progressive politics has been what role, if any, allies might legitimately play in other people's movements. Despite the significance of this debate, it has taken place in a historical vacuum.In Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, (Oxford UP, 2026) the Sixties historian Alice Echols explores what happened some sixty years ago when whites and Blacks came together in the fight against racism. She tells this story by focusing on two Black-led organizations that bookend the Sixties: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. In SNCC, whites were, in part, meant to generate a "white heat" so searing it would accelerate change. Results were mixed, and white activists formed new movements, from women's liberation to draft resistance.By 1967, the Black Panther Party was advancing its own unique brand of "revolutionary nationalism," and seeking out white supporters. Partnering with whites brought the group visibility and resources, but it also put the Panthers at odds with other Black radicals, with unfortunate consequences.Black Power, White Heat explains how solidarity lost credibility, and not just from within the movement. Here, the FBI played a key role, and so did the discourse of "radical chic," advanced most effectively by the journalist Tom Wolfe. Still, even as Black-white solidarity lost steam, it was not entirely played out. In some of the era's most important political trials, even courtrooms became sites of solidarity as predominantly white juries returned verdicts that suggested they trusted Black Panther defendants more than the District Attorneys prosecuting them. Clear-eyed about the difficulties of solidarity, Black Power, White Heat nonetheless emphasizes the achievements and considerable promise of uniting across difference, and in ways that will inform and deepen current debates roiling progressive politics. Alice Echols is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is the author of numerous books, including Daring to Be Bad, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Morteza 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: here
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    1 ora e 13 min
  • Anthony Kaldellis, "1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Anthony Kaldellis, "1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople" (Oxford UP, 2026)
    May 1 2026
    A detailed account of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, a watershed year that closed the book, once and for all, on the Roman Empire and confirmed for Europeans their worst fears about an expanding Ottoman Empire.Anthony Kaldellis offers a new narrative of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, a watershed year that closed the book, once and for all, on the Roman Empire and confirmed for Europeans their worst fears about an expanding Ottoman Empire. By the fifteenth century, Constantinople had seen better days, but it was still a vibrant center of learning, worship, commerce, and information. 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople (Oxford UP, 2026) sketches the tense but exciting shared world of Italians, Turks, and Romans that was thrown into crisis by Mehmed II's decision to conquer the city. Kaldellis showcases a detailed reconstruction following events on a day-by-day basis, pulling from gripping eye-witness testimonies in Latin, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Turkish. He weighs the strategies of both the attackers and defenders, and proves that, contrary to the fatalism that marks almost all narratives written with hindsight, in reality the defense was hardly a lost cause. The defenders knew exactly what they were doing. They were willing to risk their lives, but it was not their intention to become martyrs. Instead, it was the sultan who was scrambling to neutralize a seemingly impregnable defense. That he did so was a testament to his ingenuity and tenacity. The final chapters of 1453 trace the fate of the vanquished and their captivity. It also weighs the impact of the city's fall on the conquerors, the conquered, and on world history. 1453 was not merely a symbol for the passing of the Middle Ages and the onset of early modernity: it changed the very nature of the Ottoman empire and redirected the transmission of cultural legacies, especially those of Greek classical scholarship. The fall of Constantinople is therefore a nexus of converging pathways between east and west, medieval and modern, ends and beginnings.
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    1 ora e 14 min
  • Philip Abbott, "Sounds for a New World: The Christianizing Soundscapes of Late Antiquity" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Philip Abbott, "Sounds for a New World: The Christianizing Soundscapes of Late Antiquity" (Oxford UP, 2026)
    Apr 29 2026
    In the Greco-Roman world, gods were known to tame soundscapes, or acoustic landscapes. Zeus, Apollo, Orpheus, and other Classical deities demonstrated their power by bringing order to chaotic sound worlds, replacing cacophony with harmony. In late antiquity, Christians took up this archetype and applied it to Jesus. For many early Christians, the advent of Christ resembled the modern phenomenon of a musical key change, but on a grand scale: Jesus initiated a recalibration of the cosmic soundscape, ushering in a new world. However, according to many Christians in late antiquity, this universal key change was not yet complete. Late ancient Christians believed that they could participate in the ongoing sonic work of Christ by Christianizing the acoustic landscapes of the world.In Sounds for a New World: The Christianizing Soundscapes of Late Antiquity (Oxford UP, 2026), Dr. Philip Abbott explores how late ancient Christians envisioned themselves as participants in the worldwide retuning effort, harmonizing the Classical world to the new Christian reality. Rejecting the sounds of traditional Greco-Roman and Persian cultures, Christians advocated a variety of sonic practices to realize their grand retuning endeavor, including shouting, singing, silent meditation, chanting, and even belching. From the Latin West to the Syriac East, late ancient Christians formed a polyphonous chorus of diverse voices all joining in the great harmonizing work of Jesus as they Christianized the soundscapes of the world.For years, scholars have noted the monumental changes that took place in early Christianity during the so-called Constantinian Revolution. But Dr. Abbott turns our attention to an unexplored aspect of this transitional moment, arguing that it was not simply a political or religious revolution - it was a revolution of the senses. Central to this sensorial transformation was sound. As Christianity gained imperial power in the fourth century, Christians began the process of re-tuning the world for Christ. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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    32 min
  • Tiffany Jo Werth, "The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Tiffany Jo Werth, "The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Apr 25 2026
    The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tiffany Jo Werth explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a role that, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination. The scale of the human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide a conceptual framework for the various stony textual and visual archives this book studies. The texts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political, religious) although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue. The religious orbit encompasses the Christian rivalry with Jewish culture, touches on Christianity's tension with Islam, but most intently centers on the antagonism between Catholic and variants of Protestant and Reformed belief.The volume features canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religious polemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers and stonemasons. Accordingly, the multimedia archive includes drama, lyric and prose as well as biblical illustrations, tapestries, church furniture, paintings, anatomical drawings and statues. The lithic too is capaciously construed as a continuum of rocky as well as mineral forms ranging from bodily encrustations like the kidney and bezoar stone, to salt, iron, limestone, marble, flint and silicon. The assemblage of materials bears witness to aspirational imperial fantasies and looming colonial conquests; it engages in both syncretism and supersession; upholds and subverts gender hierarchies; limns the race-making category of hue with desire; and supports, and sometimes thwarts, elitist ideologies of an elect, chosen people. All come together via the storied pathways of stone as densely material and as a foundation for the abstract imaginary along the scala naturae. Across the lithic-human fold, stone promises, fascinates, betrays. As alpha and omega, stone can herald salvation or it can threaten with damnation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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    46 min
  • Amanda Anderson and Simon During, "Humanities Theory" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Amanda Anderson and Simon During, "Humanities Theory" (Oxford UP, 2026)
    Apr 17 2026
    Humanities Theory (Oxford UP, 2026) pioneers a new topic: the theory of the humanities. It is an urgent topic right now because the humanities face a suite of forceful new challenges and are in a period of significant change. For these reasons, it has become important to analyse and understand what the humanities are as a whole, beyond disciplinary divisions and yet without resorting to simplistic notions of their worth. Remarkably little attention has been paid to this topic. Most discussions of the humanities have been polemical if not defensive. This book argues that there exists a global humanities world which not only transcends disciplinary divisions but joins the professional academic humanities to a thriving amateur public humanities. This world has no essence, it is plural. Nevertheless, powerful, if contested, ethical orientations run through it and help shape it, including a will to truthfulness, a will to openness and generosity, a will to examine values.In their essays Simon During and Amanda Anderson each bring different emphases to their shared orientation towards a large plural humanities world:During analyses how key disciplines—sociology, philosophy and history—might be used to think about the humanities as a whole and, on this basis, offers some predictions of the future awaiting the humanities.Anderson analyzes media representations of the humanities and considers the general conceptual frameworks through which the humanities focus on value and proffer critique. She analyses a series of examples of contemporary critical engagements in the humanities to press a case for value pluralism in the humanities and the university more broadly. Amanda Anderson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She is the author, most recently, of Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (Oxford, 2018) and Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016). She previously served as the Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell and serves on the advisory board of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). Simon During, educated in New Zealand and at Cambridge, has taught at the University of Melbourne and Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of pioneering work in post-colonialism, cultural studies, and the history of entertainment but in recent years has concentrated on thinking about literature and the humanities under their difficult contemporary conditions Morteza 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: here
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    1 ora e 8 min
  • Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Apr 16 2026
    Political theorist Alisa Kessel (University of Puget Sound) has an important and impressive new book, Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Kessel’s research grew out of her work on questions of consent and how consent is embedded within the social contract structure. Initially the plan for the research was to critique this concept of “rape culture” which had found its way into popular discourse as well as academic work and was somewhat unclear in terms of application and understanding. Kessel notes in the book and in our conversations that her thinking about the idea of rape culture owes a great deal to black feminists who had been writing about and discussing the underlying issue at the heart of rape culture, which is not just about violence against women, but more broadly about the political, societal, and cultural dimensions of domination, victimhood, and human value. Rape Fantasies develops this understanding and provides fascinating examples of this intersectional concept. One of the key claims of the book is that sexual violence is not accidental, it is not necessarily based on physical urges that just cannot be controlled; it is, instead, based in the dynamic of political domination thus making rape itself a political act. Part of the unexamined problem with rape is that it is built around an entitlement to dominate, which also makes the threat of sexual violence a political act. Rape Fantasies traces this idea through a number of different case studies that unpack the dimensions of this threat of sexual violence in a variety of circumstances and situations, tied, inevitably, to the duality of domination and subordination or victimization, which is also wrapped up with questions of who is deserving of protection and who is not as deserving. Kessel explains that in examining sexual violence, what she found was multifaceted reflections and refractions, since the issue and the individual’s experience with sexual violence are neither simple nor linear. And the examples and case studies that make up the thrust of the book present this multidimensional nature of sexual violence. This multifaceted thinking about sexual violence also integrates an intersectional analysis, drawing on work from indigenous studies, feminist and women’s studies, feminist theory, black feminism, political theory and other connected schools of thought. The interrogation of rape and rape culture, particular in context of the political valence, “occurs across multiple axes of oppression, including white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, cisgender, settler colonial, and capitalist axes.”[1] The case study examples in Rape Fantasies include bathroom bills across the states, the idea of the frontier and modes of extraction, consent contracts and consent apps, and OnlyFans and intimacy on demand. Each example is deeply researched and unpacked, providing the reader with historical, legal, political, economic, cultural, and societal analyses of these complex areas of domination and entitlement. Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence is an expansive undertaking, bringing together theoretical frameworks from different schools of thought and analysis, threaded with important case studies that help the reader think deeply about this concept and how it is operationalized in our daily lives. Even if we are not aware of these narratives, they surround us and shape so much of our thinking about how the world works. And why sexual violence remains so persistent. Susan Liebell is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Lilly J. Goren is a Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin. [1] Alisa Kessel. Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Oxford University Press, 2025. p. 6.
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    4 min
  • David-James Gonzales, "Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    David-James Gonzales, "Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Apr 14 2026
    On March 2, 1945, five Mexican American families and their Jewish American lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, to end the segregation of ethnic Mexican children. In a shocking decision, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, setting a legal and historical precedent in Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County that shook the foundations of Jim Crow America and led to the end of de jure school segregation across the nation. Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals. David-James Gonzales is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.
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    1 ora e 1 min