In his new book Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2014),Neilesh Bose analyses the trajectories of Muslim Bengali politics in the first half of the twentieth century.

Daniel DiSalvo is the author ofGovernment against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2015). DiSalvo is associate professor of political science at the City College of New York, CUNY,

In understanding a tradition what is the relationship between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’? How do the lived religious lives of practitioners contest or affirm authority? In The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicis...

Religious ritual has been a staple of anthropological study. In his latest monograph, Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford University Press 2014), cultural anthropologist Matt Tomlinson takes up the topic anew through a set of f...

Daniel Prosterman‘s new book Defining Democracy:Electoral Reform and the Struggle for Power in New York City (Oxford University Press, 2013) investigates a neglected topic in U.S. history: the occasional efforts by reformers over the years to bring pro...

When a contemporary reader opens up their Bible they may be unaware of the long historical process that created the pages within. One of the key components in this history is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures between the third ...

In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr. Ernest P.

Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments.  Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting.  It is commonly held that legitimate government requires a system of universal suffrage. Yet,

Vahid Brown and Don Rassler‘s Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012 (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a meticulously researched and remarkably detailed exposition of the Haqqani network’s growth and ongoing importance among Pakistani mil...

Americans have a paradoxical relationship with cities, Steven Conn argues in his new book,Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014). Nearly three-quarters of the population lives near an urban ce...

Central Asia is one of the least studied and understood regions of the Eurasian landmass, conjuring up images of 19th century Great Power politics, endless steppe, and impenetrable regimes. Alexander Cooley,

One striking feature of humans is that fact that we sometimes act together. We garden, paint, sing, and dance together. Moreover, we intuitively recognize the difference between our simply walking down the street alongside each other and our walking do...

Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and analysis. Focused on the social relationship between French...

David Wright‘s 2011 book Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), offers readers a history that stretches far beyond the strictly defined genetic disorder that is its namesake. Wright shows us how the condition that came to b...

Hahrie Han has written How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford UP, 2014). Han is associate professor of political science at Wellesley College.

How does an author craft a work that speaks across the boundaries of dance studies, Jewish studies and gender studies? What does it mean for dance to function as a site for probing complex questions of racial, ethnic and cultural identity?

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Ca...

Our moral lives are constructed out of projects, goals, aims, and relationships or various kinds. The pursuit of these projects, and the nurturing of certain relationships, play central role in giving our lives their meaning and value.

Katherine Pickering Antonova‘s An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2012) investigates the Chikhachevs, members of the middling nobility in the pre-emancipation era.

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think – sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – has had an interesting history. It’s particularly associated with the idea that languages dismissed as primitive by 19th century thi...

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley,

What brings us together as scholars in Religious Studies? Are the various social phenomena commonly grouped together as religion really that similar? The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (Oxford University Press,

Are Islam and feminism inherently at odds? Is there a contradiction between piety and gender justice? This is the guiding theme for Rachel Rinaldo, professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, in her book Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism i...

The prediction error minimization hypothesis is the first grand unified empirical theory about how the brain implements the mind. The hypothesis, which is as bold as it is controversial, proposes to explain the mind via one core mechanism: a process of...

Through some quirk of fate, the Hobbesian tag “filling, cheap, and familiar” is probably the defining phrase used when Americans think of Chinese food. Yet what could be less accurate a description of this cuisine, born halfway around the world,