In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Memories of Colonisation in Medieval and Modern Castile: Rereading and Refashioning al-Andalus (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Rebecca de Souza traces the evolving memory of a dominant al-Andalus in medieval Castilian and, later, modern Spanish literature.
It presents a series of close readings of neomedievalist literary works that look back to the socioeconomic apogee of al-Andalus, the tenth-century Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, but were written centuries later, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. These works rewrite what has become known as the story of the siete infantes de Lara, although it is their Andalusi half-brother, Mudarra, who takes centre stage from the early modern period on. In its earliest form, it is a story of a weak, conflictual county of Castile, dependent socioeconomically and morally upon Andalusi intervention. Memories of Colonisation asks why Mudarra and the infantes continue to reappear in medieval chronicles, from the Estoria de España to lesser-known regional historiography, early modern ballads, comedias, and nineteenth-century Romantic poetry and prose.
By examining how each of these texts remembers tenth-century Iberia’s fluid geographical and interracial boundaries and Castilian disempowerment, it explores how they support or challenge dominant contemporary discourses of collective identity, race, and nation; from the neogothic aspirations of thirteenth-century Castile to the antisemitism of fifteenth-century Toledo, expansion in the Mediterranean, the Islamophobia of the morisco expulsion, and the partisan manipulation of al-Andalus under nineteenth century liberalism. It also examines how each text exposes the task of reconstructing historical memory in the present and thereby challenges the notion of a stable, incontestable past for Castile and Spain.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development, progress, and neighborhood changes are observed. But what does gentrification sound like?
In Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, (Oxford UP, 2025), author Allie Martin engages this question in Washington, DC, asking how Black people experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Drawing from music, interviews, soundscape recordings, and more, Martin argues that gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others. Martin employs a combination of methodologies from ethnomusicology, Black Studies, geography, and digital humanities to make audible the ways in which gentrification disrupts and disturbs community. Throughout, she centers Black feminist listening practices, thinking through digital modes of listening and imagining emancipatory soundscapes.
Intersectional Listening benefits from an innovative combination of sources, from interviews and soundwalks to passive acoustic recording and machine learning. Martin shares compelling stories of music and sound in the nation’s capital, and in doing so shifts conversations about how we listen to Black life. By foregrounding how processes of gentrification systematically seek to devalue, mishear, and ultimately silence Black possibility, Intersectional Listening posits how we can challenge ourselves to refute the consistent mishearing of Black people in Washington, DC and beyond.​
Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist and artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. She is an assistant professor in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work is attuned to questions of race, sound and power. Her first book, Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, explores the relationships between race, sound, and gentrification in the nation's capital. Allie is the director of the Black Sound Lab, a research environment dedicated to amplifying Black life and decriminalizing Black sound through digital practice.

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We tend to talk about globalisation as if it arrived with container ships, multinationals and the internet. Christopher Meissner’s One from the Many: The Global Economy since 1850 (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that it has a far longer and messier history. In my latest New Books Network interview, I put that history, and some of its biggest open questions, to him.
A book for a nervous moment
Tariffs, industrial policy, “economic security” and the relocation of supply chains have revived the argument that globalisation is going into reverse. Meissner, Professor of Economics at UC Davis and a Research Associate at the NBER, takes the long view. Trade, capital and migration surged between 1850 and 1914, collapsed between the wars, and were rebuilt after 1945. His conclusion is that globalisation is hard to kill, but not guaranteed to survive. That depends on political choices and international cooperation.

If you teach economics, history or political science, or simply want to know whether today’s headlines signal the end of globalisation, this book and this conversation are for you.
What we talk about
Why the first globalisation happened, and what a Briton, an Argentine or an American in 1900 would have made of today’s world
Migration: we have liberalised goods and capital far more than people, so how much does that limit globalisation’s power to reduce inequality?
Whether backlash was always built into globalisation, or whether wars and shocks brought it down, and what that means for today’s politics
The Great Depression and the question of leadership: can the world economy function without a power willing to underwrite it?
The paradox of the US dollar, and why capital flows towards the richest economy rather than the poorest
What evidence would convince Chris that “this time really is different”
Writing a first book, and why economics works best inside history rather than bolted on beside it.

Some of these questions came from my own students, where the book is now core reading. They like it because it explains long-run change while making formal theory accesible.
What other reviewers say
Barry Eichengreen, in Foreign Affairs, praised its clarity and concision across nearly two centuries. In Good Reads, Jason Furman called it a reliable, readable history, well grounded in the research literature. Donald Boudreaux, in The Independent Review, judged it an admirable survey of key events and theories, although he took issue with some analytical choices. That makes it a useful starting point for readers who want to form their own view.

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Constructing a Renaissance Pope: Rhetoric, Ceremony, and Authority in the Age of Leo X (1513-1521) (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth McCahill examines the rhetoric and ceremony of the papal court during the pontificate of Pope Leo X (1513-1521).
The son of Lorenzo de' Medici, Leo has been celebrated for bringing a Golden Age of cultural efflorescence to Renaissance Rome, but he has also been excoriated for the prodigality, nepotism, and corruption that provoked Martin Luther first to criticize and then to split from the church. This study does not focus on Leo as a historical individual but analyses the collaborative efforts of curial officials, humanists, and ceremonial experts to construct his image. Although personal loyalty and private self-interest motivated these bureaucrats and scholars, so too did commitment to a traditional vision of papal authority, a vision facing new challenges in an era of rapid spiritual, social, and political change.
Weaving together material from the diaries and manuals of Paris de' Grassi, the papal Master of Ceremonies, and a variety of letters, orations, and other humanist texts, the book situates papal image-making techniques within the broader context of Renaissance culture. It argues that the scripted rites and Ciceronian rhetoric on which the papal court spent so much time and money served as tools of persuasion, creating a rarefied arena in which power, hierarchy, and tradition were continually enacted and negotiated. By embedding curial activities within the geopolitical and cultural landscape of early sixteenth-century Europe, the book illuminates the tension between the mystique of traditional authority and the new technologies, political norms, and religious dissent that conspired to destabilize the papal role.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Mediating God: Muhammad Ghazali and the Politics of Divine Presence in 20th century Egypt (Oxford UP, 2025) is a fascinating and compelling intellectual biography of the Egyptian Muslim theologian, scholar, and activist, Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1996). Al-Ghazali shaped the views of multiple generations of Muslim activists and was a one-time leading intellectual of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Mediating God charts his rise as a leading theologian in the Brotherhood during the 1940s, his subsequent clash and expulsion from the group in 1953, and his extensive post-Brotherhood career during the Nasser years.

To tell this story, it excavates a massive collection of writings by Brotherhood members and their affiliates, many of which have never before been utilized in secondary scholarship. Through an analysis of this collection, Mediating God provides the first in-depth view at the richly cosmopolitan and eclectic intellectual milieu of the Brotherhood and its affiliates from the 1930s through the 1960s. It focuses particular attention on the underexamined, though voluminous, writings al-Ghazali and his colleagues dedicated to charting God as real and meaningful presence in all arenas of human life, from the mundane realms of daily life to political struggles and scientific enterprises. Ultimately, by highlighting the centrality of God as an inscrutable and incalculable-yet intimately known and felt-presence in al-Ghazali and his colleagues' project of spiritual and social uplift, Mediating God provides a way of understanding modern Islamic politics beyond the scholarly framework of Islamism and attendant claims about the functionalization, objectification, and systemization of Islam in modernity.
Dr. Zarate is an assistant professor of Global Humanities at San Jose State University. He completed his PhD at Columbia University and is now a historian of the modern Middle East whose research explores Islam, theology, politics, science, and spirituality in twentieth-century Egypt. His scholarship has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His work combines historical research with approaches drawn from religious studies and anthropology, building on his training at Columbia University as a historian of global Islam. He has conducted extensive archival research in Egypt and the United States and works with Arabic-language primary sources.
Dr. Amanie Yahia Antar is a post doctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada whose research concentrates on the history of Islamophobia in the premodern era, with a focus on sixteenth century Iberia.

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