Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s gestures. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
Barry Blake is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University, and his books include Playing with Words, All About Language, and this May’s Secret Language: Codes, Tricks, Spies, Thieves, and Symbols. In the following piece he reveals the mysterious significance of the name in societies past.
Christopher A. Kearney is a Professor of Psychology and Director of UNLV Child School Refusal and Anxiety Disorders Clinic, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His new book, Helping Children with Selective Mutism and their Parents, provides information that can help readers better understand and combat selective mutism. In the excerpt below, Kearney provides some techniques to help children cope with their anxiety about speaking.
Well the time has come for me to say goodbye to all of you lovely readers. Running the OUPblog has been a dream job and leaving is very bittersweet. So I thought before I left we could take a trip down memory lane and review some of the best blog posts of the past. This list certainly is not conclusive, just a few of the thousands of posts I had the honor of sharing with you. Please keep in touch. You can follow my adventures on twitter @FordBecca. Ciao!
The morning of June 9th, I and about 500 NYC elementary school students gathered at the Apollo theater to dance, gawk at rap music icons, and…learn about healthy eating. Hip Hop HEALS (Healthy Eating and Living in Schools) is a program that seeks to teach young people the rules for healthy living, ways to prevent heart disease and strokes, and curb the incidences of childhood obesity.
When I first took over the OUPblog I gave our readers a chance to ask me questions so they could get to know me. Since Lauren will be in charge starting Monday (get excited!), I decided to ask her a few questions before I go. I think her answers will give you a taste of how lucky we are to have her on-board. Don’t worry I plan on saying a proper goodbye tomorrow (Friday).
70 years ago, this month, France was thrown into turmoil by the dramatic turn of events of the Second World War. From May 1940, the Germans advanced successfully through the North of the country and the Allies were routed. The British Expeditionary Forces were evacuated at Dunkerque leaving the French populations, both civilian and military, terrified and exposed to invasion.
Wednesday 16 June was Bloomsday, when fans of James Joyce’s seminal 1922 novel Ulysses celebrate the author’s work. In Ulysses, the action takes place within a single day – 16 June 1904 – in Dublin. As my own nod to Bloomsday, I’m bringing you a short excerpt from Jeri Johnson‘s Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Ulysses, in which she talks about the novel’s formidable reputation and the intimidation readers coming to the novel for the first time might feel.
This month Oxford celebrated the publication of the newest edition of the landmark AIA Guide to New York City with a launch party in the largest architectural exhibit in the world─The Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum of Art. Where can you find an apartment for $50 in New York City? The ego of Robert Moses?
Are break and brake related? Yes, they are, but the nature of their relationship deserves a detailed explanation. Break is an ancient word. It has cognates in all the Germanic languages, and Latin frango, whose root shows up in the borrowed words fragile, fragment, and refract, is believed to be allied to it (the infix n may be disregarded for reconstructing the protoform). The principal parts of break in Old English were brecan (infinitive), bræc (preterit singular; æ, as in Modern Engl. man), and brocen (past participle). At that time, verbs like break (so-called strong verbs, which displayed such alternations) had four principal parts.
Yesterday the Saville Report, which looked into the events of and surrounding Bloody Sunday in 1972, was published after 12 years. It is the longest and most expensive public inquiry in UK history, costing £195m ($288m). Today I bring you a short excerpt from Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction by Marc Mulholland, which talks about Bloody Sunday and other incidents from the Northern Irish Troubles.
David Kilcullen was formerly the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq and is currently advising General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan. Killcullen is also Adjunct Professor of Security Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. His new book, Counterinsurgency, is a picture of modern warfare filled with down-to-earth, common-sense insights which helps makes sense of our world in an age of terror. In the excerpt below, from the beginning of the book, Kilcullen explains the two fundamentals of counterinsurgency warfare.
Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history. In the post below we provide the answers to last week’s Tony quiz. How many did you get correct?
Recently Tim Parsons, author of this month’s Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall, stopped by Oxford with his wife Ann. Here Ann asks Tim a few questions about his book and what empires past tell us about the present.
Robert Freedman, MD, is Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado and the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry. His new book, The Madness Within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuronal Process, is a discussion of these two aspects of the illness. Freedman outlines the emerging understanding of schizophrenia as a neurobiological illness. In the excerpt below we learn about the basic brain dysfunction in schizophrenia.
We’ve made it to Friday, everyone! From now on, you’ll be hearing a lot more from me as I transition into the role of Blog Editor after next week. To let you know a little about myself, Rebecca has graciously let me share some items that caught my attention this week.