OxPods

Across the animal kingdom sexual behaviours have evolved which increase the chances of individuals finding a mate and successfully reproducing. However, some are more of a challenge to explain than others. Masturbation...

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, researching the...

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? To begin to answer...

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, for instance, what...

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 technology? I’m...

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-year Biology...

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 other conceptions of...

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-Bissau built...

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' queer identity in the...

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 entered the second...

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, bringing in their...

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 event entitled ‘What is...

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 medieval Latin Europe...

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 Radical Right: A...

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 education and political...