Episodes

  • Zach Fredman and Judd Kinzley eds., "Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937–1949" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Zach Fredman and Judd Kinzley eds., "Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937–1949" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Sep 16 2025
    This timely collection of essays examines Sino-American relations during the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War and the opening of the Cold War. Drawing on new sources uncovered in China, Taiwan, the UK and the US, the authors demonstrate how 'grassroots' engagements - not just elite diplomacy - established the trans-Pacific networks that both shaped the postwar order in Asia, and continue to influence Sino-US relations today. In these crucial years, servicemen, scientists, students, businesspeople, activists, bureaucrats and many others travelled between the US and China. In every chapter, this innovative volume's approach uncovers their stories using both Chinese and English language sources. By examining interactions among various Chinese and American actors in the dynamic wartime environment, Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937–1949 (Cambridge UP, 2024) reveals a new perspective on the foundations of American power, the brittle nature of the Sino-American relationship, and the early formation of the institutions that shaped the Cold War Pacific.
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    34 mins
  • Martin Austin Nesvig, "The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Martin Austin Nesvig, "The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Sep 14 2025
    The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women – the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the Canarian daughter of a Count who ate peyote and mixed her bath water into a man's mustard supply; the wife of a Spanish conquistador who let her hair loose and chanted to a Mesoamerican god while sweeping at midnight; the wealthy Basque woman with a tattoo of a red devil; and many others – routinely adapted Native ritual into hybrid magic and cosmology. Through a radical rethinking of colonial knowledge, Dr. Nesvig uncovers a world previously left in the shadows of historical writing, revealing a fascinating and vibrant multi-ethnic community of witches, midwives, and healers. 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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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Matthew V. Novenson, "Paul and Judaism at the End of History" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Matthew V. Novenson, "Paul and Judaism at the End of History" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Sep 13 2025
    The apostle Paul was a Jew. He was born, lived, undertook his apostolic work, and died within the milieu of ancient Judaism. And yet, many readers have found, and continue to find, Paul's thought so radical, so Christian, even so anti-Jewish – despite the fact that it, too, is Jewish through and through. This paradox, and the question how we are to explain it, are the foci of Matthew Novenson's groundbreaking book, Paul and Judaism at the End of History (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The solution, says the author, lies in Paul's particular understanding of time. This too is altogether Jewish, with the twist that Paul sees the end of history as present, not future. In the wake of Christ's resurrection, Jews are perfected in righteousness and – like the angels – enabled to live forever, in fulfilment of God's ancient promises to the patriarchs. What is more, gentiles are included in the same pneumatic existence promised to the Jews. This peculiar combination of ethnicity and eschatology yields something that looks not quite like Judaism or Christianity as we are used to thinking of them. Matthew Novenson is the Helen H. P. Manson Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is also an honorary fellow in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, where previously he held the Chair of Biblical Criticism and Biblical Antiquities. His monographs include Christ among the Messiahs (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Grammar of Messianism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Paul, Then and Now (Eerdmans, 2022), and Paul and Judaism at the End of History (Cambridge University Press, 2024). 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).
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    43 mins
  • Devika Shankar, "An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India, 1860-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Devika Shankar, "An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India, 1860-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Sep 12 2025
    Ecological and political instability have time and again emerged as catalysts for risky development projects along India's south-west coastline. In An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India, 1860-1950 (Cambridge UP, 2024) Devika Shankar probes this complicated relationship between crisis and development through a focus on a port development project executed in Cochin in the first quarter of the twentieth century amidst significant political and ecological uncertainty. While ecological concerns were triggered by increasing coastal erosion, a political crisis was precipitated by a neighbouring princely state's unprecedented attempt to extend its sovereignty over the British port. This integrative environmental, legal, and political history brings together the history of British India and the princely states to show how these anxieties ultimately paved the way for an ambitious port development project in the final years of colonial rule. In the process it deepens our understanding of environmental transformations and development in modern South Asia and the uneven nature of colonial sovereignty. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • J. Siguru Wahut, "In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    J. Siguru Wahut, "In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Sep 9 2025
    In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa (Cambridge UP, 2025) unpacks the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that organize and circulate journalistic narratives in Africa to show that something complex is unfolding in the postcolonial context of global journalistic landscapes, especially the relationships between cosmopolitan and national journalistic fields. Departing from the typical discourse about journalistic depictions of Africa, J. Siguru Wahutu turns our focus to the underexplored journalistic representations created by African journalists reporting on African countries. In assessing news narratives and the social context within which journalists construct these narratives, Wahutu captures not only the marginalization of African narratives by African journalists but opens up an important conversation about what it means to be an African journalist, an African news organization, and African in the postcolony.
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

    Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
    Aug 31 2025
    In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, out this year, 2020, with Cambridge University Press. The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in its approach than earlier forms of meteorology, this new science claimed to deliver weather forecasts for months and even years ahead, on the premise that weather is caused by the atmospheric effects of the planets and stars, and mediated by local and seasonal climatic conditions. Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores how these forecasts were made and explains the growing practice of recording actual weather. These records were used to support forecasting practices, and their popularity grew from the fourteenth century onwards. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval science, Medieval Meteorology demonstrates that the roots of scientific forecasting are much deeper than is usually recognized. Professor Lawrence-Mathers is the author of The True History of Merlin the Magician and Magic and Medieval Society,(along with Carolina Escobar-Vargas) as well as a host of articles and reviews about Medieval magic and religion. With this book the author continues her examination of spiritual practice – licit and illicit, clerical and lay – as it was culturally understood in the medieval era. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.
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    31 mins
  • Aaron Hammes, "TransGenre" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Aaron Hammes, "TransGenre" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Aug 26 2025
    TransGenre (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a reconsideration of genre theory in long-form fiction through transgender minor literature in the US and Canada. Using four genre sites (the road novel, the mourning novel, the chosen family novel, and the archival novel), this Element considers how the minoritized becomes the minoritarian through deterritorializing generic conventions in fiction to its own ends. In so doing, TransGenre proposes narrative reading practices as strategies of the minor to subvert, transgress, and reappropriate the novel's genealogy and radical future prospects. A range of fiction published in the last decade is deployed as largely self-theorizing, generating its own epistemological, thematic, and formal innovations and possibilities, revealing cisheteronormative underpinnings of generic categories and turning them in on themselves. Aaron Hammes holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, and was most recently the Virginia and Walter Nord Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Hammes has published on sex work, transgender literature, and prison abolition in South Atlantic Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Routledge Handbook of Transgender Literature, Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and GLQ. Their first monograph, TransGenre, (Cambridge, 2025) is an exploration of genre theory and contemporary transgender minor literature. Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin.
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    1 hr
  • Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
    Aug 21 2025
    Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe. 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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    56 mins