Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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Le 14 juillet

By Sanja Perovic
Le 14 juillet, as Bastille Day is known in France, is the only national festival that commemorates the French Revolution. According to revolutionary gospel, it marks the day when the ‘people’ stormed the state prison that once stood on today’s Place de la Bastille, thereby heralding the end of despotism and an era of freedom. 

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Is obesity truly a public health crisis?

Obesity is often framed by public health officials as an epidemic, leading to a virtually unequivocal understanding of fat as “bad.” What this framing does not take into account, however, are the increasingly negative consequences of categorizing people – particularly women – as overweight.

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A trial of criminology

By P.A.J. Waddington
The British Society of Criminology annual conference was held this year at the University of Wolverhampton and its centrepiece was to hold a trial of criminology. Presided over by His Honour, Judge Michael Challinor, both the ‘prosecution’ and ‘defence’ wore wigs and gowns, and there was the usual bout of examination and cross-examination of witnesses.

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What is the legacy of Henry VIII?

Was Henry VIII a “family man” so to speak? The notion seems vaguely ridiculous; by 1547, the philandering English monarch had laid claim to six wives, two of which he had executed, including the infamously-beheaded Anne Boleyn.

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Why reference editors are more like Gandalf than Maxwell Perkins

By Max Sinsheimer
Recently I was chatting with a regular at my gym, an Irish man named Stephen, when he asked me what I do for a living. I told him I am an editor in the reference department at Oxford University Press, and he excitedly launched into a description of the draft manuscript he had just completed, a novel about his wild (and illicit) youth spent between Galway and the Canary Islands.

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Letters from Heaven

By Martyn Lyons
While researching in the Archive of Everyday Writings (Archivo de las Escrituras Cotidianas) in Alcalá de Henares, I came across a very curious manuscript. It was the copy of a letter from God which, it claimed, had descended to earth during a Mass held in St. Peter’s in Rome. It had been picked up by a deaf-mute boy called Angel, who miraculously began to read it aloud.

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Book groups and the latest ‘it’ novel

Robert Eaglestone
I’ve never been to a book group (although I was once invited to a Dad’s ‘Listening to the Album of the Month with Beer’ club) but I’ve always been afraid that it would be a bit of a busman’s holiday for me, or, worse, that – because I’m basically a teacher – it would turn me into the sort of terribly bossy know-it-all you don’t want drinking your nicely chilled wine. That said, I often get asked to recommend the current ‘it’ novel for book groups.

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A sweet, sweet song of salvation: the stars of Jesus rock

The Jesus People movement emerged in the 1960s within the hippie counterculture as the Flower Children rubbed shoulders with America’s pervasive evangelical subculture. While the first major pockets of the movement appeared in California, smaller groups of “Jesus freaks” popped up—seemingly spontaneously—across the country in the late Sixties.

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Untied threads

By Joel Sachs
Unidentified key players are the bane of biographers, who cannot resist the urge to tie all the knots. In my case, writing about the extraordinary life of the composer Henry Cowell, two people resisted identification, both of them connected with the sad story of Cowell’s imprisonment on a morals charge.

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Cooperation through unproductive costs

By Jason A. Aimone, Laurence R. Iannaccone, Michael D. Makowsky, and Jared Rubin
What do prison gangs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Ultra-Orthodox Jews have in common? All of these groups require highly-visible “costs” that reduce their members’ opportunities in the outside world.

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Flutes and flatterers

By Anatoly Liberman
The names of musical instruments constitute one of the most intriguing chapters in the science and pseudoscience of etymology. Many such names travel from land to land, and we are surprised when a word with romantic overtones reveals a prosaic origin. For example, lute is from Arabic (al’ud: the definite article followed by a word for “wood, timber”).

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Nine curiosities about Ancient Greek drama

The International Festival of Ancient Greek Drama held annually in Cyprus during the month of July. Since its beginning in 1996, the festival has reimagined performances from the great Ancient Greek playwrights, so we dug into J.C. McKeown’s A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities for some of the lesser known facts about Ancient Greek theatre.

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Can religion evolve?

John Schellenberg
On the last page of ‘On The Origin of Species’, Charles Darwin turns from millions of years of natural selection in the past to what he calls a “future of equally inappreciable length” and ventures the judgment that “all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress to perfection.”

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the politics of “variable obscenity”

By Christopher Hilliard
It’s the most famous own goal in English legal history. In London’s Old Bailey, late in 1960, Penguin Books is being prosecuted for publishing an obscene book – an unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The prosecution asks the jury whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was “a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read.”

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Thinking through comedy from Fey to Feo

By Keith Johnston
Comedy is having a bit of a cultural moment. Everywhere you turn people seem to be writing seriously about comedians and the art of comedy. Tina Fey and Caitlin Moran are credited with setting the agenda for pop feminism, Marc Maron is hailed as a pioneer of new media journalism, Louis CK is mentioned in the same breath as Truffaut, and Tig Notaro is regarded as an “icon”…

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