Secularism is an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe. It is embodied in the conflict between secular republics—from the US to India—and the challenges they face from resurgent religious identity politics; ...

We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbringing, acculturation, and education of a child.

Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press,

Katherine Paugh‘s new book The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the crucial role that reproduction took in the evolution of slavery in the British Caribbean.

Claudia Leeb’s new book, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject (Oxford University Press, 2017), takes up pressing issues within contemporary political and feminist theory,

In his recent monograph, Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Justin R. Ritzinger examines the cult of Maitreya as developed during the Republican period by the Chinese m...

I own many Bibles, but curiously, I didn’t purchase any of them. They were all given to me, almost all by Protestant Christians. And, considering the history of Protestant Christianity, that impulse to freely offer “God’s word” makes a lot of sense.

In Stephen Pimpare‘s new book, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017), the reader is encouraged to think about how we portray poverty and people in poverty in movies. Overall,

Within a few generations after the death of Muhammad Muslims developed complex legal and theological traditions that shaped the boundaries of what was deemed Islamic. In Coercion and Responsibility in Islam: A Study in Ethics and Law (Oxford University...

Scholars regularly assert that at Chicago’s World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 Swami Vivekananda initiated Hinduism in America. Many histories of Hinduism in America reproduce this type of synthesizing narrative.

In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies explains in his book The City of London and Social Democr...

By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford University Press,

What is science? A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilliant scholar of Victorian science, Iwan Rhys Morris, they were tapping the right man for the job on the ...

The civil war in Yemen today harkens back to a similar conflict half a century ago, when the overthrow of the ruling imam, Muhammad al-Badr, in 1962 sparked a conflict that dragged on for the rest of the decade.

In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere – the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass – both published their first works.

There is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, Associate Professor of Religion at California Lutheran U...

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven.

Jocelyn Olcott is an associate professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her book International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-raising Event in History (Oxford University Press,

First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Crispus Attucks’ death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans’ struggle to incorporate their exp...

In the 10th century, a succession of Byzantine rulers reversed centuries of strategic policy by embarking on a series of campaigns that dramatically reshaped their empire. This effort and its consequences for the history of the region is the focus of A...

Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics,

Jennifer Fleeger‘s Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine (Oxford University Press, 2014) tells the story of women in film and their representation as aberrations, but also as moments of emancipation and agency.

No book was more accessible or familiar to the American founders than the Bible, and no book was more frequently alluded to or quoted from in the political discourse of the age. How and for what purposes did the founding generation use the Bible?

Rosalind Rosenberg‘s book Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a multi-layered and rich biography of Pauli Murray, an activist, lawyer and Episcopal priest whose life intersected with the most significant civil and hum...

In our era of economic instability, rising inequality, and widespread immigration, complaints about fairness and life chances are coming from an interesting source: white people, specifically members of the working class.