Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

This episode features Daniel Majchrowicz, Associate Professor of South Asian Literature & Culture at Northwestern University, discussing his new book, The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. It is a study of South Asia’s global imagination as it was expressed in Urdu-language travel writing from 1840 to the present. The book argues that travel writing in South Asia was a broadly ecumenical genre that let Indian travelers not just describe the world as they found it, but to imagine it as they wished for it to be.  Opening this vast South Asian travel atlas, The World in Words introduces a new literary genre, unlocks new forms of literary subjectivity from long-ignored voices, and reveals new modes of circulation, mobility, and connection between India, Asia, and Africa, while also revealing how class, language, gender, race and power formed in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. While this is an academic book that could be used in South Asian studies courses and Islamic Studies courses, it also reads in part like a travelogue as Majchrowicz shares his own journeys discovering texts, libraries, and splendid private collections, sometimes with unexpected but fruitful leads. This text helps to decenter Western colonial travleogues and narratives, and allows for South Asian writers from Khanums' to princes' voices to be heard and studied, while also tracing the development of Urdu as a dominant regional language.

Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Alissa Klots is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework. Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Dr. Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to improve the lives of household workers in the modern world. 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.

With Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922–1943 (Cambridge UP, 2017), Roberta Pergher transforms our understanding of Fascist rule. Examining Fascist Italy's efforts to control the antipodes of its realm - the regions annexed in northern Italy after the First World War, and Italy's North African colonies - she shows how the regime struggled to imagine and implement Italian sovereignty over alien territories and peoples.  Contrary to the claims of existing scholarship, Fascist settlement policy in these regions was not designed to solve an overpopulation problem, but to bolster Italian claims to rule in an era that prized self-determination and no longer saw imperial claims as self-evident. Professor Pergher explores the character and impact of Fascist settlement policy and the degree to which ordinary Italians participated in and challenged the regime's efforts to Italianize contested territory. Employing models and concepts from the historiography of empire, she shows how Fascist Italy rethought the boundaries between national and imperial rule.

How do we know what we know about the origins of the Christian religion? Neither its founder, nor the Apostles, nor Paul left any written accounts of their movement. The witnesses' testimonies were transmitted via successive generations of copyists and historians, with the oldest surviving fragments dating to the second and third centuries - that is, to well after Jesus' death.  In Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings (Cambridge UP, 2022), Markus Vinzent interrogates standard interpretations of Christian origins handed down over the centuries. He scrutinizes - in reverse order - the earliest recorded sources from the sixth to the second century, showing how the works of Greek and Latin writers reveal a good deal more about their own times and preoccupations than they do about early Christianity. In so doing, the author boldly challenges understandings of one of the most momentous social and religious movements in history, as well as its reception over time and place. Markus Vinzent has recently retired as Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London. He is a Fellow of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt. A recipient of awards from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Agence Nationale de Recherche, France, he is the author of Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 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).

Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change. Ever thus. As John L. Brooke shows in his remarkable Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2014), what we might colloquially call “the weather” has been nudging, pushing, and dramatically altering the course of World history for eons. Sometimes it’s dry; sometimes it’s wet. Sometimes it’s hot; sometimes it’s cold. Sometimes the air is good; sometimes it’s bad. There are patterns, as John points out, but there’s also a good degree of unpredictability–it is, after all, the weather. What’s happening right now, though, is not in the slightest unpredictable: if we keep dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it’s going to get hot; if it gets hot, things are going to change–again.

Hans Noel is the author of Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Noel is an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University. He is also the co-author of The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. To most casual observers of politics ideology and party affiliation are synonymous. Noel argues that, while that may largely be the case today, it wasn’t always so. He employs a novel method to trace the articulation of ideology over the 19th and 20th centuries, to explore the way liberalism and conservatism evolved. He writes: “The clear pattern is that in the 19th century, ideology was not unidimensional, but it became increasingly so over the 20th century.”

According to a longstanding tradition in ethical theory, the primary subject of moral evaluation is the person, or, more specifically, the person’s character. Aristotle stands at the head of this tradition, and he held that moral theory must take as its center a theory of the good man; he hence devised an elaborate conception of the virtues–those dispositions and traits constitutive of the good life for human beings. Virtue ethics thrives to this day. In fact, virtue theorizing has been applied to other normative domains, including especially epistemology. In Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mark Alfano investigates the ways in which virtue ethics and epistemology are affected by recent results from behavioral sciences that call into question the idea that humans sustain stable and robust character traits. Drawing on a range of empirical data, Alfano suggests a reinterpretation of the virtues. Rather than seeing them as steady and fixed dispositions to act across a broad range of situations, Alfano argues that virtue attributions be seen more as self-fulfilling prophecies: when we properly attribute courage to a person, we heighten her tendency to behave in courageous ways. Alfano then extends this account to the intellectual virtues discussed by virtue epistemologists.

When did groups in Kufa begin forming unique identities leading to the development of Shiism? Najam Haider, professor of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University, answers this question in his book, The Origins of Shia: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa (Cambridge University Press, 2011). This study is a boon for those with research interests in early Shiism, or the history of Islam prior to the ninth century. In the first section of his book, Haider announces his intention to test literary narratives of the origins of Shiism: namely, if Shiism did, in fact, develop during the early 8th century and if it was the product of the merging of two distinct groups. To answer those questions he proposes to analyze the 8th-century Kufa traditions. Haider examines these traditions on the basis of their legal authorities and the composition of their narrative styles.He applies this method to three cases studies in the second section of his book: (1) the basmala in ritual prayer, (2) the use of qunÅ«t, a blessing or curse, in prayer, and (3) the prohibition of intoxicants. Each case study centers on ritual which Haider argues is a more determinative means of ascribing identity then an individual or group’s theology. Based on the results of these three case studies, Haider proposes a revised history of Shiism in his third section. Haider’s work stands out for the clarity of the questions he seeks to answer and the method he employs in doing so. Every chapter concludes with a concise summary of the major points and the entire work is filled with charts of data to help readers understand how the massive corpus of information he utilized was organized and categorized. Scholars will obviously benefit from its proposed revised history, but its readability makes it useful for undergraduates and laypersons.

Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is one of ideas. And that it is in the worst possible sense, for neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in evidence. They don’t want the facts to get in the way of their arguments. In his remarkable book The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Benjamin Radcliff provides facts that should help both Democrats and Republicans, despite their many differences, decide how to proceed. He asks a simple, compelling question: do conservative or liberal public policies make people happier? After an extensive and sophisticated analysis of the data, he reaches an equally simple, compelling answer: liberal policies do. Radcliff is a great friend of the free market; it is obvious, he says, that capitalism is the best economic system we have at our disposal. But he is also pragmatic: all the evidence shows that free markets alone don’t make people as happy as markets combined with robust welfare and labor-protection programs. There is a lesson here for both Democrats and Republicans. Listen up.

It seems that everyone in Hollywood is on the political Left. “Seems” is the operative word here, because there are actually Republicans in pictures, at least according to this website. (NB: I have no idea whether the folks who created this list know what they’re talking about, so beware.) Nonetheless, it’s pretty certain that most–the vast majority?– of Hollywood-types are on the Left. But it wasn’t always so, as Donald T. Critchlow shows in his fascinating book When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013). There was a time–the 1940s and 1950s–when Conservatives were an important and very vocal faction in Hollywood. This group emerged out of opposition to the New Deal and found their issue in anti-Communism. They were, truth be told, never terribly numerous. But they made up for their small numbers by their political savvy and, ultimately, their ability to produce skillful, viable political candidates. One of them, of course, was Ronald Reagan, who proved to be very skillful and very viable indeed. It’s a remarkable and largely forgotten story. Listen in. This interview is brought to you by Cambridge University Press.