Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Kate Scott
The last time President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln sat for a portrait photograph together was in the early 1870s, five years or more after the president’s death and burial. The president, filmy and translucent, tenderly placed his see-through hands on his wife’s shoulders as she looked into the camera.
By Joseph B. Raskin
Service on the first route of the New York City subway system began 109 years ago today, on 27 October 1904. The occasion was marked by ceremonies in City Hall, led by George A. McClellan and representatives of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), the operators of that line. Mayor McClellan saw the opening of the subway as the beginning of a new era for the greater city.
As Grand Central Terminal celebrates its centennial this year, I have found myself admiring other accomplishments of the firm responsible for a significant part of its design, Warren & Wetmore. In my first days in the New York office of Oxford University Press, I noticed an imposing cadre of busts from the southeast windows of the building.
By Kandice Rawlings
Saint Francis of Assisi died on this day in 1226, and when he was canonized just two years later, the fourth of October became his feast day. Even before his sainthood was official, St Francis was a popular figure among the faithful, and the religious order he had founded already had chapters throughout Europe.
By Tony Whyton
Created by the Berlin-based street artist MTO, a graffiti artwork was painted on a Parisian wall a few years ago and only on display for a few days before being painted over. A few photographs of the image, taken by MTO at the scene, are all that remain of the work.
By G. Ronald Murphy, S.J.
A lot of things become clear when you realize that many of the puzzling and mysterious Christian artifacts and poetry of the North, those from England and Germany as well as those from the Scandinavian countries, are speaking in the language of Germanic myth—specifically in the language of the ancient evergreen tree, the savior of the last human beings, Yggdrasil.
By David Ellwood
Is French culture exceptional, exceptionalist, or just… unique ? The question was raised again this year by the row which broke out just before the start of US-EU trade talks. The French government insisted that cultural products, particularly film and television, should be left out of the negotiations due to their special status as timeless acts of artistic creation.
By David Blockley
The costly controversy over the abandonment of the ambitious Wear Bridge scheme and current plans by Sunderland City Council to ‘reduce down to a simpler design’ is a manifestation of what can happen when thinking about various forms of art is confounded.
By Kandice Rawlings
Summer is over, and it’s back-to-school season. Art students are heading back to their classrooms and studios, receiving a course of training that will help them become professional artists.
By Audrey Ingerson
“I, who love women, wanted to give her clothes in which she could drive a car, yet at the same time clothes that emphasized her femininity, clothes that flowed with her body. A woman is closest to being naked when she is well dressed.”
By Sharon Zukin
Today, the sixth of August, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park riot in New York’s East Village. Though on that night many neighborhood residents were protesting in the streets, the riot was caused by police brutality.
By Matthew Beaumont
Pater’s most celebrated and controversial book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) is about the distant past, superficially at least, and therefore risked seeming irrelevant even in his own time. It could not however have inspired a generation of undergraduates, including Oscar Wilde, to embrace aestheticism, and a cult of homoeroticism, as his critics claimed, if it had not also been a coded polemic about the present.
By Tatiana Holway
Two hundred years ago today, on 3 August 1813, Joseph Paxton turned ten. In a farm hand’s family of nine children, this was likely to have been a nonevent. A decade after that, the day would also have come and gone like any other.
By Arthur Shimamura
We love art. We put it on our walls, we admire it at museums and on others’ walls, and if we’re inspired, we may even create it. Philosophers, historians, critics, and scientists have bandied about the reasons why we enjoy creating and beholding art, and each has offered important and interesting perspectives.
By Aaron Meskin, Margaret Moore, Mark Phelan, and Matthew Kieran
Are the bad art pictures on Tumblr really bad or are they just unfamiliar? Would we come to like them more–and judge them as better–if we looked at them more? In order to answer these questions, we need to consider the mere exposure effect.
By Dimitris Plantzos
We can’t think of classical Greece without its nude statues, but what was it about nudity that made Greece classical? Thucydides was convinced that taking your kit off while exercising was a sign of cultural progress.