In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

The Gnostic Trilogy is the best-known and most important work by the ascetic philosopher and teacher Evagrius of Pontus. Among the writers of his age, Evagrius stands out for his short, perplexing, and absorbing aphorisms, which provide sharp insight into philosophy, Scripture, human nature, and the natural world.The first part of the trilogy, the Praktikos (The Practiced One), provides a diagnosis and treatment of the eight tempting thoughts. It was a foundational text for monastic asceticism and was the basis for the later Seven Deadly sins tradition. The second, Gnostikos (The Knower), explains how someone who has mastered the body and mental delusions should teach others. The third, longest, and most controversial, the Kephalaia gnostika (Gnostic Chapters), ranges broadly over the origin of the universe, the nature of rational beings, and the hidden symbols of Scripture. This part was responsible for Evagrius's condemnation as a heretic and, as a result, does not survive intact in the original Greek and must be restored from ancient translations.Evagrius of Pontus: The Gnostic Trilogy (Oxford UP, 2024) presents the Trilogy in its entirety for the first time since antiquity and provides a fresh, comprehensive English translation of all three works, in all their known ancient versions, both Greek and Syriac. Detailed explanatory notes, cross-references to Scripture, to ancient literature, and to Evagrius's other writings, as well as commentary on the translation techniques of the Syriac translators, provide the necessary resources for understanding this significant but puzzling text.New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Robin Darling Young is Professor of Church History at the Catholic University of America. Joel Kalvesmaki is a digital humanist and the editor of University of California Press’s book series Christianity and Late Antiquity. Find a link to his online Guide to Evagrius in the show notes. Columba Stewart is executive director of HMML, sounds like heaven, but short for the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John’s University and Abbey in Minnesota. Charles Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought at Harvard Divinity School and the director there of the Center for the Study of World Religions. Fr. Luke Dysinger is Professor of Church History and Moral Theology at St. John’s Seminary in California. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

War in the 21st century will remain a chameleon that takes on different forms and guises. Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War (Oxford University Press, 2024) edited by Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels offers the first comprehensive update and revision of ideas about the future of war since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the war has fundamentally shifted our perspective on the nature and character of future war, but also cautions against marginalising many other parallel trends, types of war, and ways of waging them.World-renowned international experts from the War Studies field consider the impact of the war in Ukraine on the broader social phenomenon of war: they analyse visions of future war; examine the impact of technological innovation on its conduct; assess our ability to anticipate its future; and consider lessons learned for leaders, soldiers, strategists, scholars and concerned citizens.Beyond Ukraine features contributions from Azar Gat, Beatrice Heuser, Antulio Echevarria, Audrey Cronin, T.X. Hammes, Kenneth Payne, Frank Hoffman, David Betz, Jan Willem Honig, and many other pre-eminent thinkers on the past, present and future of war—including an afterword by the late Christopher Coker.Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands’ War Studies Research Centre of the Netherlands Defence Academy.Jeffrey H. Michaels PhD is the IEN Senior Fellow in American Foreign Policy and International Security at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

The war on the Eastern front remains relatively less well explored as compared to the western front of World War II. Yet some of the most titanic battles in modern military history occurred on the steppes of eastern Europe. Stalingrad and Moscow are names known to most but less well-known are the vast battles that occurred in Byelorussia. By June 1944, Stalin and his generals had launched Operation Bagration involving more than two million soldiers marching across fronts hundreds of miles wide. In his latest work, Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Oxford UP, 2024), Jonathan Dimbleby chronicles the military, political, and diplomatic events of the final months on arguably the most crucial front of World War 2.Dimbleby draws on previously untranslated accounts from ordinary Russian and German soldiers to chronicle the curtain call of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Endgame 1944 provides insights into the major German and Russian players balanced off with accounts of the trials of individual soldier..Dimbleby has enjoyed a long career in television beginning with ITV and BBC where he covered world affairs. He presented ITV's flagship weekly political program This Week for over ten years. He has also worked in radio with BBC 4. His book Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein was short-listed for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, awarded to the best work of historical non-fiction. He is also Chair of Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund named after his father.

Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers.In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022), Charles Barr considers films and filmmakers, and studios and sponsorship, against the wider view of changing artistic, socio-political, and industrial climates over the decades of the 20th Century. Considering British cinema in the wake of one of the most familiar of cinematic reference points–Alfred Hitchcock–Barr traces how British cinema has developed its own unique path, and has since been celebrated for its innovative approaches and distinctive artistic language.Charles Barr worked for many years at the University of East Anglia, helping to develop one of the first UK programs in film studies at the graduate and undergraduate level. He has since taught in St. Louis, Galway, and Dublin, and is currently a Research Fellow at St. Mary's University, Twickenham. Much of his published work has been on British cinema, including the books Ealing Studios and English Hitchcock, and he was cowriter, with director Stephen Frears, of Typically British, part of the centenary history of cinema broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995. He has continued writing on Hitchcock, with a study of Vertigo in the BFI Classics series and Hitchcock: Lost and Found, coauthored with the Parisian scholar Alain Kerzoncuf.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His writing and other interviews about literature and film can also be found on Pages and Frames.

In his new book, We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America (Oxford UP, 2020), Kevin Mattson documents punk rock in the early 1980s through a comprehensive look into the music, zines, films, bands, and punk Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. He shows how widespread the punk movement was in creating a counterculture that challenged the conservative narrative of 1980s America. Mattson places the punk countercultural movement into the wider context of Reagan’s America and the cultural war that his presidency created. In opposition to Reagan’s panic narratives of nuclear wars, his tax cuts for the rich, and cuts to public education and other social services, punks saw themselves as everything they rejected about the US. Mattson’s extensive archival research into the punk counterculture makes for an informative and captivating read into the larger ways in which punk impacted American cultural identities and challenged 1980s conservativism.

In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world.The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire to appear in over a generation. Covering political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy, Anthony Kaldellis's volume is divided into ten chronological sections which begin with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and end with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The book incorporates new findings, explains recent interpretive models, and presents well-known historical characters and events in a new light.

The development of Christian scriptures did not terminate once, for example, following Irenaeus and other influential patristic figures, the four gospels that would later be located at the front of the church’s New Testament were accepted by most churches and transmitted together in the same codex. Instead, erudite Christian readers employed new and innovative technologies to transform reading practices, calling attention to both narrative and other thematic similarities present across the gospels, and enabling cross-referential access from one gospel’s narrative sequence to another without amending the individual texts themselves. Such practices were facilitated by the sections and canon tables of Eusebius (ca. 260–339 CE), bishop of Caesarea Maritima in Roman Palestine.In Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2023), Jeremiah Coogan discusses the editorial intervention of Eusebius within gospel manuscripts, including paratextual sectioning, tables of contents, and other prefatory material, at both a technical and conceptual level, locating the overall apparatus of this “evangelist” alongside broader late ancient transformations in reading and knowledge. Dr. Coogan joined the New Books Network to discuss examples of gospel reading that Eusebius permitted via his novel contributions to the gospels, related book technologies in his contemporary readerly environment, and the overall success of Eusebius’s sections and canons during the millennium that followed him—starting with Greek and Latin gospel manuscripts of late antiquity but also appearing alongside most biblical translations into the late Middle Ages, when modern chapter divisions and versification began to assume the dominant roles for sectioning texts that they have maintained into the present day.Jeremiah Coogan (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 2020) is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. His research and teaching interests span the New Testament, early Christianity, and ancient Judaism, with a particular focus on Gospels and on the social history of early Christianity. His scholarship has been published in Early Christianity, the Journal of Early Christian Studies, the Journal of Late Antiquity, the Journal of Theological Studies, and in several other journals and edited volumes, and he is currently working on a new project that investigates how early Christians deployed literary and bibliographic categories to understand similarities and differences between Gospel texts. His first monograph, Eusebius the Evangelist, received the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise in 2022.Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

Eliza Scidmore (1856-1928) was a journalist, a world traveler, a writer, an amateur photographer, the first female board member of the National Geographic Society — and the one responsible for the idea to plant Japanese cherry trees in Washington DC. Her fascinating life is expertly told by Diana Parsell in Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington's Cherry Trees (Oxford UP, 2023).This is the first biography of Eliza Scidmore, and it draws not only on Scidmore’s surviving letters and photographs but also her some 800 articles and 6 books. By piecing together the chronology of Scidmore’s travels, Parsell has crafted a wonderfully intimate picture of Scidmore’s life, one that documents her trips from the glaciers of Alaska (complete with seal-flipper soup) to the streets of Beijing on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion. Throughout, Scidmore’s tenacity and her joy of discovery really shine through, as do the causes that she advocated for: cross-cultural understanding, environmental conservation, and the beautification of the Potomac.This book is sure to appeal to those interested in travel writing, the history of journalism, and early travelers to East Asia, as well as anyone looking to read a biography about a woman who lived a truly unique life.

This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh.In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Emily Farrell, with a focus on citizenship, Othering, and belonging. The conversation also homes in on the joys and challenges of juggling book writing and motherhood, and leaving academia for a career in publishing.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Emily Wilbourne argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labour; some laboured at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people.Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary performances and musical conventions, this book makes the forceful claim that operatic musical techniques were-from their very inception-imbricated with racialized differences. Dr. Wilbourne offers both a macro and micro approach to the content of this book. The first half of the volume draws upon a wide range of archival, theatrical and historical sources to articulate the theoretical interdependence of razza (lit. "race"), voice, and music in early modern Italy; the second half focuses on the life and work of a specific, racially-marked individual: the enslaved, Black, male soprano singer, Giovannino Buonaccorsi (fl.1651-1674). Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence reframes the place of racial difference in Western art music and provides a compelling pre-history to later racial formulations of the sonic.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.