Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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Remembering Frank Norris

By Jerome Loving
More than a century ago, on October 25, 1902, we lost a major novelist by the name of Frank Norris, author of McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899). Like Stephen Crane, he died in his prime, but not before writing at least one of the great American novels in the naturalist tradition of Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser.

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Shakespeare in disguise

Celebrate Halloween with Shakespeare and Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO)! Test your knowledge on which characters disguise themselves, what the witches say around their cauldron, why ghosts haunt the living, and who plays tricks in the night …

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Astrobiology: pouring cold asteroid water on Aristotle

By David C. Catling
Over 2,300 years ago, in his book De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle asked if other Earth-like worlds exist and dismissed the idea. But now, remarkably, the question is on the verge of being answered scientifically. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, has collected data on the statistical occurrence of small planets that orbit stars at a distance where it’s the right temperature for liquid water and conceivably life.

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Sofia Gubaidulina, light and darkness

Today is the birthday of a composer who writes in a radically different musical style than many of us are accustomed to hearing on a day-to-day basis, as we sit on hold with the doctor’s office or hum along with the music piped into the aisles of the grocery store.

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Vernon Scannell: War poetry and PTSD

By James Andrew Taylor
the more I read about his life after the war – the monumental drinking binges, the black-outs, the terrifying, sweating nightmares, and most of all the raging, unreasonable jealousies and the sickening violence that he meted out to his wife and, later, his lovers – the more I began to wonder whether this was not also the story of a man seriously damaged by his wartime experiences.

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“Deuce,” “doozy,” and “floozy.” Part 2

By Anatoly Liberman
It is hard to hide something (anything) from Stephen Goranson (see his comment to Part 1), who will find a needle in a haystack, and The Canterville Ghost is a rather visible needle. Yet Oscar Wilde is no longer as popular as one could wish for.

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Participating in the OAPEN program

By Andrew Pettinger
I was recently invited by Oxford University Press (OUP) to have my book, The Republic in Danger, published on the online open access library OAPEN. After a few general questions, I happily accepted. Why?

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Why study economics?

As you begin your university course in economics, you’re probably wondering just how your studies will intersect with the world outside the classroom. In the following adapted excerpt from Foundations of Economics, author Andrew Gillespie highlights the importance of studying economics.

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Urban warfare around the globe [interactive map]

What is the future of warfare? Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen’s fieldwork in supporting aid agencies, non-government organizations, and local communities in conflict and disaster-affected regions, has taken him from the mountains of Afghanistan to the cities of Syria. His experience in the last few years has led to new ways of thinking about the face of global conflict.

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Five reasons to stay sober after October

Macmillan Cancer Support have raised over £1 million with their #gosober for October campaign. But is this a lifestyle that more of us should adopt permanently? Here are five great reasons to stay sober after October.

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Getting and keeping the vote

By Jean Baker
Organizing for the women’s suffrage parade planned for 23 October 1915 in New York had taken months. By this time leaders of the New York movement were practiced at arranging such popular spectacles in a state that would be a significant prize, with parades its most effective, opinion–changing tactic. Finally–nearly seventy years after the Seneca Falls Convention and its call for women’s suffrage– the momentum seemed to be shifting.

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Images of jazz through the twentieth century

From the Harlem Rag to grand pianos to the Grammy awards to the international stage… Jazz has had many different incarnations since its origins 120 years ago. This brief slideshow with images from Mervyn Cooke’s The Chronicle of Jazz conveys the diversity of change in jazz performers throughout the years. Innovation, experimentation, controversy, and emotion — all found in the most imaginative and enduring music.

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