OxPods

What is the history of Yoga? And how can something apparently Indian have become such an everyday activity for people across the world? I’m Robert Taylor, a History DPhil student at New College, rese…

The witch craze that gripped early modern Europe has been the subject of many studies. What can we learn about English society in this period through the lens of belief in and persecution of witches?…

The British hippie movement of the 1960s left an indelible mark on popular culture and woven into this counterculture was a fascination with Indian spiritual practices. When the Beatles went to India…

The ‘East’ has held a special place in the British cultural imagination. But how can we chart this historically? And how useful are frameworks of ‘East’ and ‘West’ within a modern world connected by …

To most, otters are those small fluffy creatures that lie back, hold hands and drift off into the sunset. In this episode, PhD student Claire Marr shakes up that expectation in conversation with 4th-…

Understanding the five senses is a foundational element of modern education, but how long has this been the case throughout history? Where did the idea originate and how did it survive when so many o…

This episode explores the diplomatic strategies of Lusophone African liberation movements at the United Nations. We speak with Maria de Costa to discuss how movements in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea…

Queer history is a relatively new addition to the lexicon of historical analysis, and questions remain about how best to approach the study of queerness in the past. To what extent can we 'find' quee…

The development of Christianity in the centuries following the death of Jesus was far from plain sailing. Which ideas and authors played the most significant roles in the shape of the religion as it …

Climate change is understandably a current hot topic (no pun intended) that many of us care a lot about. But how good is our climate literacy, really? Three panellists from Oxford take on this topic,…

Host: Charlie Bowden

Editor: Charlie Bowden

In celebration of the 300th anniversary of the establishment of the Regius Professorship of History at Oxford, the History Faculty organised a research ev…

Description: The process of creolization, in which various languages and cultures mix into diverse new forms, has been an underutilised tool in historical analysis for some time. In the context of me…

Our final episode of the academic year! An interview with Nuffield College postdoctoral prize research fellow Vicente Valentim on the theory put forward in his upcoming book “The Normalization of the…

British society was fundamentally shifted by the Second World War, and among the many transformations that took place in the post-war years, those experienced by young people in respect to their educ…

Pandemics of the past highlight the persistent threat of disease throughout human history. It might seem that our repeated encounters with infectious diseases should have better prepared us for such …

Depression has developed from a taboo topic to one that is widely spoken about and investigated in recent years. There are several debates surrounding its heritability, symptoms whether diagnosis can…

When we read anthropological accounts, it is easy to overlook the extensive fieldwork and lived experiences that inform them. How can anthropologists interrogate the ethics of their discipline, and f…

Starting in comic books and more recently appearing in movies and television shows, characters like Captain America and Superman have become household names. But where did these superheroes come from…

Traditions of political protest in Spain, particularly the practices of caceroladas and cencerradas, have frequently been conflated by modern scholars as they are both actions rooted in the productio…

Over 3.3 billion people get almost 20% of their protein from seafood. The consumption of species from wild populations is pivotal in preventing malnutrition and improving food security, especially in…