Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

In Gender Hierarchy in the Qur’an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Karen Bauer tackles one of the foremost hot-button questions of the day: What is the role of gender in the Qur’an? Dr. Bauer’s adroit study will leave the reader informed but perhaps also disrupted, given the vast spectrum of competing, sometimes contradictory, interpretive paradigms that she explores. A key strength of the text, moreover, is that in addition to its meticulous investigation of primary texts from medieval and modern traditions of Qur’anic exegesis, Dr. Bauer also conducts numerous in-person interviews with prominent scholars across the Muslim world, including Iran and Syria. Thus, from a literary perspective, the text presents the reader with a compelling style seldom found in Qur’anic studies publications, seamlessly weaving together close textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork. Notably, Bauer also gives attention to Sunni as well as Shi’i perspectives on her study, thus offering provocative comparison and breadth of analysis. Given the careful scholarship of the book combined with its equally careful presentation, Bauer’s masterful monograph will almost certainly become standard reading for anyone interested in questions related to the Qur’an and gender. It will also interest scholars, more broadly, in the fields of Qur’anic studies, gender studies, law, political science, and the history of Islamic thought.

Eitan Hersh is the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Hersh is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University.We’ve come to think of political campaigns as highly sophisticated data-processing machines, capable of precisely targeting voters based on the last item they bought on Amazon. Hacking the Electorate suggests something very different about how campaigns actually target voters. Hersh argues that political campaigns vary greatly in how detailed their data actually are, at the whim of whether the state collects detailed or more general information about voters. Campaigns typically use the best available public data to design targeting strategies. As a result, strategies vary across the country based on how campaigns perceive voters in different information environments.If you just haven’t had enough podcasting for the day, click over to my good friends at the Scholar Strategy Network and their new podcast, No Jargon. Listen to their first podcast featuring my new book, Tea Party Divided (Praeger, 2015) and learn about how the Tea Party is shaping the contentious politics of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.

In YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Cecile E. Kuznitz, Associate Professor of Jewish History and Director of Jewish Studies at Bard College, offers the first book-length history of YIVO, the center for Yiddish scholarship founded in the 1920s by a group of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals. Could scholarship serve as the foundation for a diaspora nationalism?Kuznitz traces the ups and downs of YIVO, using unpublished documents from the center’s archives.

Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial history on the legal questions around slavery. In particular, he traces the implementation of the Code Noir, France’s earliest attempt to impose a legal structure on its American...

Douglas L. Kriner and Andrew Reeves have written The Particularistic President: Executive Branch Politics and Political Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Kriner is associate professor of political science at Boston University; Reeves is assistant professor of political science at Washington University in St. LouisIn the midst of a presidential election in which every candidate claims to want to serve the entire country, can we believe them? Are presidents servants of the nation or do they pursue much more narrow constituencies? Kriner and Reeves argue that, rather than governing as universalists, presidents are particularistic, adhering to the electoral and partisan goals of re-election and advancing their party. They show this with evidence on presidential decisions on base closure, trade, and disaster relief.

The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge UP, 2015) is a new contribution to the study of Islam and more specifically to the history of Islamic Law and its development. Guy Burak, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies librarian at New York University, explores the Ottomans’ adoption of one branch of the Hanafi legal tradition as the official school (madhhab) of the dynasty. The period of time in which this process occurred was during the 15th to 18th centuries, and Burak focuses on the lands of Greater Syria. What Burak seeks to illustrate is that through the adoption of an official school of law, the Ottoman hierarchy played a significant role in how the school of law was shaped. Examples Burak provides to demonstrate this phenomenon are the institutionalization of the position of mufti, the formalization of genealogical literature (tabaqat), and the canonization process of books essential to the school. In addition to examining the propagators of official Ottoman positions, Burak also examines how scholars not part of the Ottoman mainstream branch functioned and responded to these changes. Overall, this work represents and important contribution to the study of Islam, the history of Islamic Law, and Ottoman Studies.

A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is the latest book by Gyanendra Pandey. The book analyses prejudice and democracy through a comparison of African Americans and Indian Dalits. Pandey’s method of exploring these disparate populations and enormously complex themes, is to focus on particular case studies that are at once both very private and public, and thus allow for a truly unique, subtle and delicate analysis of what would be unwieldy topics in another’s hands. Simultaneously small and large, the book’s protagonists and author’s questions remain in the reader’s mind, long after putting down the book.

In the historiography on South Asian Islam, the creation of Pakistan is often approached as the manifestation of a vague loosely formulated idea that accidentally emerged as a nation-state in 1947. In his magisterial new book Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Venkat Dhulipala, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, thoroughly and convincingly debunks such a narrative. Creating a New Medina is an encyclopedic masterpiece. Through a careful reading of a range of sources, including the religious writings of important 20th-century Muslim scholars, Dhulipala shows ways in which Pakistan was crafted and imagined as “The New Medina” that was to represent the leader and protector of the global Muslim community. What emerges from this thorough examination is a nuanced and complicated picture of the interaction of nationalism, religion, and politics in modern South Asian Islam. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rise of Muslim nationalism in late colonial India, the contribution of B.R. Ambedkar to the public discussions and debates on Pakistan, ‘Ulama’ discourses and debates on Pakistan, and the partition and its afterlives. This wonderfully written and painstakingly researched book will be of tremendous interest to students and scholars of Muslim politics, nationalism and religion, and South Asian Islam.

Korea presents a fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity. For instance, the first continuous Christian community in the peninsula was founded by Koreans themselves without any missionaries coming into the country. In their new book, A History of Korean Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2014),Sebastian C. H. Kim and Kirsteen Kim provide the first English-language study that covers the history of Christianity, including Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy, from its beginnings in the peninsula to the present day. This thoroughly-researched work skillfully weaves together such subjects as church-state relations, spirituality, and the global impact of Korean Christianity, into a narrative that is easy for someone unfamiliar with the subject to follow, but deep enough that experts in the field will gain much from a careful reading.

In this podcast I talk with Laura F. Edwards, Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University about her book, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (Cambridge University Press 2015).Per the book’s introduction, “[a]lthough hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the Civil War, perhaps the war’s biggest casualty was the nation’s legal order. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction Amendments, are the best-known legal innovations of the era. Change, however, permeated all levels of the legal system, altering American’s relationship to the law and allowing them to move popular conceptions of justice into the ambit of government policy. The results linked Americans to the nation through individual rights, which were extended to more people and, as a result of new claims, were reimagined to cover a wider array of issues. But rights had limits in what they could accomplish, particularly when it came to the collective goals that so many ordinary Americans advocated. Ultimately, Laura F. Edwards argues, this new nation of rights offered up promises that would prove difficult to sustain.”Some of the topics we cover are:–The way, in the lead up to the Civil War, all arguments came back to the Constitution.–How wartime policies in both the Confederacy and the states that remained in the Union fundamentally remade the –legal authority of the nation.–Why the Confederacy’s legal order was at odds with its stated governing principles.–Popular conceptions of Reconstruction-era legal change.