In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Mar 03 2025 1606 ep. 56 mins 1.1k

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast artwork

Interviews with Oxford University Press authors about their books

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Isabel Moreira, "Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mar 03 2025 65 mins

This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described in contemporary sources as beautiful and intelligent, she rose to power through her marriage to the short-lived King Clovis II. As regent for her young son, she promoted social and political reforms in Francia that included the rescue a

Marion Laurence, "Intrusive Impartiality: Learning, Contestation, and Practice Change in United Nations Peace Operations" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 24 2025 51 mins

Impartiality is a guiding principle in United Nations peace operations that has helped legitimize multilateral intervention in dozens of armed conflicts around the world. In practice, it has long been associated with passive monitoring of cease-fires and peace agreements. In the twenty-first century, however, its meaning has been stretched to allow for a range of forceful, intrusiv

Tabish Khair, "Literature Against Fundamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 22 2025 78 mins

Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism. Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking 'devices' known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material ('language') and it

Claire C. Robison, "Bringing Krishna Back to India" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 20 2025 49 mins

The Hare Krishnas have long been associated with American hippie culture and New Age religious movements. But they have developed deeply rooted communities in India and throughout the world over the past 50 years. Known officially as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), this once-marginal religious community now wields vast economic assets, political influe

Aidan McGarry, "Political Voice: Protest, Democracy, and Marginalised Groups" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 18 2025 60 mins

In Political Voice: Protest, Democracy, and Marginalised Groups (Oxford UP, 2024), Aidan McGarry examines the agency of marginalised people, emphasizing the processes through which different communities around the world articulate their political voices. McGarry develops an innovative concept of political voice around three elements: autonomy, representation, and constitution. This

Erika Graham-Goering et al., "Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Feb 14 2025 48 mins

Jana Byars talks to Erika Graham-Goering of the University of Oslo about Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which was edited by Graham-Goering, Jim van der Meulen, and Frederik Buylaert. The origins of modern European states are often traced back to the expansion of royal and princely authority in the late Middle Ages, tran

David Pitt, "The Quality of Thought" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 13 2025 62 mins

The idea that there is a distinct phenemenology of thought – that there is thinking experience just as there is visual experience or auditory experience – is a radical position in philosophy of mind. David Pitt is one of its foremost proponents. In The Quality of Thought (Oxford University Press, 2024), Pitt provides an extended defense of the position and its implications: if

Bertil Lintner, "The Golden Land Ablaze: Coups, Insurgents and the State in Myanmar" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 13 2025 48 mins

Four years ago, on Feb. 1 2021, the Burmese military overthrew the fledgling democratic government in the Southeast Asian country of Burma, officially known as Myanmar. That sparked a civil war that continues today–with neither the military junta nor the various rebel groups coming closer to victory. How did the country get here? Veteran Asia journalist Bertil Lintner tackles the

Randall Fuller, "Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 13 2025 55 mins

In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the

Michael Rembis, "Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Feb 09 2025 49 mins

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. U