In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Video games are a significant part of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century. From Words with Friends to Grand Theft Auto, most people spend at least some of their leisure time with video games. In his book, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), William Gibbons examines the intersection between video games and classical music. From close readings of the scores of specific games to an analysis of games with characters related to classical music, Gibbons asks what happens when highbrow art meets lowbrow entertainment. Often classical music enhances the visual and storytelling elements of a game by sonically marking characters or situations as wealthy or sophisticated, as also happens in film and TV scores. Gibbons finds unexpected connections and layering of signification as video game scores exploit musical references from sources as far flung as Stanley Kubrick’s films to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He ends the book with an account of how orchestras are trying to use the immense popularity of gaming to raise money and attract new audiences by playing concerts of video game music.William Gibbons is an associate professor of musicology and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University. His research centers on how canonical classical music repertoires function outside their initial time of compositions. In addition to his first book, Building the Operatic Music (University of Rochester Press), he has published numerous journal articles including in American Music, 19th-Century Music Review, and Opera Quarterly, and has co-edited a volume on video game music published in 2014 and another forthcoming later this year both from Routledge Press.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

Sometimes people are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of what they believe. And sometimes they are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of how they believe – broadly, their ways of thinking, inquiring, handling evidence, and managing information. We sometimes criticize others for being careless, dogmatic, gullible, and so on. These evaluations often have the form of appraisals of the persons to whom they are applied. So, just as we might speak of intellectual virtues, we can also speak of intellectual vices.In Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford University Press, 2019), Quassim Cassam develops a conception of epistemic vice, and explores the sites where specific vices of this kind appear. The result is a fascinating examination of the ways in which individuals’ flawed ways of thinking can impact the world.

Tiffany Jasmin González speaks with Dr. Gabriela González about her award-winning book, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2018) to talk about the strategies transborder activists used to redeem la raza from body politic exclusion happening in the U.S. She finds that middle-class Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans modernized la raza by encouraging Mexican-origin people to take ethnic pride and unity seriously, and to find strategies to create community during a time when Mexico and U.S. pushed for modernization. Dr. González’s rich analysis of the Idar family, the Munguía family, Leonor Villegas de Magnón and the Mexican Revolution, Emma Tenayuca, and LULAC illustrates another story of activism in the early twentieth century. Turn your volume up and tune in to this episode to learn more.Tiffany Jasmin González is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at Texas A&M University.

In Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2019), Nolan McCarty synthesizes what scholars know and don't know about the origins, development, and implications of rising political conflicts in the United States. While the current political climate feels like extreme views are becoming more popular, McCarty also shows that, contrary to conventional belief, the 2016 election was a natural outgrowth of 40 years of polarized politics, rather than a significant break with the past. He concludes the book reflecting on the election and presidency of Donald Trump in the context of polarization.McCarty is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Alex Broadbent's Philosophy of Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2019)  asks two central questions about medicine: what is it, and what should we think of it? Philosophy of medicine itself has evolved in response to developments in the philosophy of science, especially with regard to epistemology, positioning it to make contributions that are medically useful. This book locates these developments within a larger framework, suggesting that much philosophical thinking about medicine contributes to answering one or both of these two guiding questions.Taking stock of philosophy of medicine's present place in the landscape and its potential to illuminate a wide range of areas, from public health to policy, Alex Broadbent introduces various key topics in the philosophy of medicine. The first part of the book argues for a novel view of the nature of medicine, arguing that medicine should be understood as an inquiry into the nature and causes of health and disease. Medicine excels at achieving understanding, but not at translating this understanding into cure, a frustration that has dogged the history of medicine and continues to the present day.The second part of the book explores how we ought to consider medicine. Contemporary responses, such as evidence-based medicine and medical nihilism, tend to respond by fixing high standards of evidence. Broadbent rejects these approaches in favor of Medical Cosmopolitanism, or a rejection of epistemic relativism and pluralism about medicine that encourages conversations between medical traditions. From this standpoint, Broadbent opens the way to embracing alternative medicine.An accessible and user-friendly guide, Philosophy of Medicine puts these different debates into perspective and identifies areas that demand further exploration.

Is “Vedic” fire sacrifice at odds with “Hindu” image worship? Through a careful study of ritual (śanti) texts geared towards appeasement of inauspicious forces (primarily the Atharva Veda and in the Bṛhatsaṃhitā, an Indian astrological work), Marko Geslani demonstrates the persistent significance and centrality of the work of Brahmanical priesthood from ancient to medieval to modern times. In doing so he aptly problematizes the scholarly tendency to demarcate Vedic ritual from popular Hinduism. Join me today as I speak with Marco about his new book Rites of the God-King: Śānti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism(Oxford University Press, 2018).For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com.

There is no denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. The Queen is an iconic yet reserved figure, what with the kerchiefs, the corgis, and the deftly delivered speeches at state occasions. The younger royals seem to be interested in keeping it real, engaging different publics while maintaining ‘the Firm’s’ commitment to service to the nation. Like Greek Gods or reality show contestants, when it comes to the Royals, we all have our favourites.We have come a long way from the eighteenth century, when monarchs were branded as tyrants. At least that is the impression we get if we read the great anti-monarchical voices of the enlightenment. For Thomas Paine, ‘Monarchy and succession have laid the world in blood and ashes’. But lately historians have been taking a second look at the place of monarchy in the history of a global British empire. Hanna Weiss Muller is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University. In Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) she shows that the relationship between ‘subjects’ and ‘sovereign’ was defined by complex and shared bonds. The book takes us around the British empire, from Quebec, to Gibraltar to Calcutta, and reveals the many ways in which the status of subject bound the empire together.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today’s readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer’s Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler’s speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy. Keyser’s careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both.Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat’s research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814 (Oxford University Press, 2019) bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, Seán Moore, Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire as well as journal Editor for Eighteenth Century Studies, merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora.The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

The metaphor “object lesson” is a familiar one, still in everyday use. But what exactly does the metaphor refer to?In her book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press, 2018), my guest Sarah Anne Carter reveals that object lessons were a classroom exercise, in wide use during the nineteenth century. She traces them from the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi, through his English adherents, to seemingly unlikely outposts of educational revolution as the Oswego, New York school system. And she takes the story into politics, advertising, and racial segregation.Her book is study of intellectual history and of intellectual culture. But Sarah’s book, and this conversation, is also about asking questions of things which cannot speak. Sarah’s interest in objects comes not simply from her training as an intellectual historian, but as a curator of museums. She is curator and director of research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, and is passionate about teaching people the history behind the objects that museums contain.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.