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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
It’s been an eventful week in Oxford spires (although I write this from the New York office which contains no spires). We had a kerfuffle over the OED and we’re gearing up for the Place of the Year extravaganza next week. So what have we learned in between?
For this week’s contribution to OUPblog, we’ve gone audio — we are the Oral History Review, after all. In our first podcast, our guest Stephen Sloan elaborates on “On the Other Foot: Oral History Students as Narrators,” a piece he wrote for the most recent issue of the OHR (volume 39, issue 2). This post represents another first: an effort to give current and future OHR contributors room to discuss their articles further.
St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, is rather a mysterious figure; very little is actually known about his life. Meanwhile, St Andrew’s Day, on 30th November, is well-established and widely celebrated by Scots around the world. The bestselling Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations include quotes from a wide-range of people, on an even wider-range of subjects. Here are some contributions from some of Scotland’s most treasured wordsmiths.
What do anaesthetists do? How does anaesthesia work? What are the risks? Anaesthesia is a mysterious and sometimes threatening process. We spoke to anaesthetist and author Aidan O’Donnell, who addresses some of the common myths and thoughts surrounding anaesthesia.
By Robyn Arianrhod
29 November 2012 is the 140th anniversary of the death of mathematician Mary Somerville, the nineteenth century’s “Queen of Science”. Several years after her death, Oxford University’s Somerville College was named in her honor — a poignant tribute because Mary Somerville had been completely self-taught. In 1868, when she was 87, she had signed J. S. Mill’s (unsuccessful) petition for female suffrage, but I think she’d be astonished that we’re still debating “the woman question” in science.
By Terza S. Lima-Neves
For a relatively unknown small island nation in West Africa with a population of half a million people, Cape Verde enjoys a rich and lively music scene. This archipelago of ten islands and former Portuguese colony is a nation historically affected by drought and famine, leading to a very sizable global immigrant community. Many of Cape Verde’s musicians either live abroad or were born in countries such as Portugal or the United States, the host country of the largest community of Cape Verdeans outside of Cape Verde.
Three words to sum up Alan Turing? Humour. He had an impish, irreverent and infectious sense of humour. Courage. Isolation. He loved to work alone. Reading his scientific papers, it is almost as though the rest of the world — the busy community of human minds working away on the same or related problems — simply did not exist.
By Anatoly Liberman
It has been a tempestuous month in the world but a quiet one in the department of English etymology. Both the comments and the questions I received dealt with separate words, and there have been not too many of them.
Lollygag. In July 2007 I already wrote what I thought about this word. Although most people, at least in America, say lollygag, its doublet lallygag is well-known. The variation is typical.
By Daniel Bar-Tal and Izhak Schnell
While many countries moved towards termination of occupation, colonialism, and imperialism, Israel still continues the prolonged occupation of West Bank and part of Golan Heights, and partially controls Gaza Strip. It appears that the prolonged occupation bears harsh moral, social, and psychological consequences, not only for the occupied population, but to the occupying society as well. Prolonged occupation refers not only to a statutory or geographical situation, but also inherently carries with it moral and socio-psychological meanings.
By Dr Rosie Harding & Dr Elizabeth Peel
According to official statistics, a significant minority of people living with dementia are prescribed antipsychotic drugs. The 2012 National Dementia and Antipsychotic Prescribing Audit suggests that there has been a fall in the prescription of these medications. However, less than half of GP practices in England participated and thousands of people with dementia are still prescribed antipsychotic drugs each year. What many perhaps don’t know is that only one antipsychotic (Risperidone) has actually been licensed for use in elderly people with dementia.
By Jim Cullen
As anyone vaguely familiar with his work knows, Day-Lewis is legendary for the extraordinary variety of characters he has played, and the vertiginous psychological depth with which he has played them. I first became aware of Day-Lewis in early 1985, when, in the space of a week, I watched him portray the priggish Cecil Vyse in the tony Merchant-Ivory film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Room with a View and then saw him play Johnny, the punk East End homosexual, in Stephen Frears’s brilliantly brash My Beautiful Launderette.
>By Liz Wollman
One of the largest — and, I admit, most disappointing — revelations I had while researching 1970s adult musicals for my book, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City, was just how tame they all ended up being. Sure, there was frank talk about sex in most adult musicals. There were also a lot of naked bodies on display.
By Gordon Thompson
Fifty years ago, the Beatles recorded their arrangement of “Please Please Me,” a lilting lover’s complaint transformed into a burst of adolescent adrenaline. On 26 November 1962, after repeated attempts to capture just the right balance of frustration and anticipation, George Martin informed them over the studio intercom that they had just recorded their first number-one disc. But the path to the top of the charts would not be easy.
November is National Pomegranate Month and we thought it’d be interesting to highlight the fascinating history of this fruit. Here are some fun facts from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Second Edition, edited by Andrew F. Smith. Plus, the “Pomegranates” entry in the Encyclopedia by David Karp.
Oxford University Press hopes you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Following a weekend of food comas and couch potato-ing, here’s a slideshow celebrating the Place of the Year (POTY) shortlist nominees that hopefully will perk you up this morning. See how our ten finalists have changed over the years. We’re excited to announce the location that will join Yemen, South Africa, Warming Island, Kosovo and Sudan as a Place of the Year winner on December 3rd! Stay tuned!
By Kathleen Taylor
Ours is a world full of science. Much of that technology and knowledge, from mobile phones to the understanding of gravity, currently comes from what we call ‘the natural sciences’: those which study the material universe. In school, we learn to distinguish physics, chemistry, geology, and their natural kin from life sciences like biology and psychology. Our ideas of what science is, and indeed what we are, have been shaped accordingly. The brain supremacy, that coming era in which neuroscience will challenge physics for cultural dominance, is about to reshape those ideas as never before.