Arts & Humanities Archives | OUPblog

Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Are spirits in space? Exploding spirits and absolute theories of space and time

By Emily Thomas
Read More
Selecting repertoire for upper voices – a conductor’s perspective

By Joanna Tomlinson and Neil Ferris
Read More
Spotify Playlist: Broadway tunes in pop culture

By Laurence Maslon
Read More

Arts & Humanities

Northeast India: a new literary region for IWE

By Nandana Dutta

It’s a young literature – this body of English writings from the eight states of India’s Northeast. Often evaluated in comparison with the rich tradition of Assamese literature (from the largest state in the region and going back several centuries) and overshadowed by the growing dominance of a ‘mainstream India-centred’ Indian writing in English, it began to emerge into the literary-critical scene at the turn of the 20th century, without a splash and with extreme modesty.

Re-thinking post-war theatre architecture

By Alistair Fair

The official opening on 14 June 2018 by the Queen and Duchess of Sussex of Chester’s new cultural ‘hub’, Storyhouse, offers a timely moment to consider the theatre as a building type. Storyhouse is an interesting re-thinking of what an Arts building can be. It combines a theatre, cinema, library, and café, in an attempt to break down boundaries between artistic and institutional structures.

Not your grandmother’s women’s lib movement: Femen’s uncivil disobedience

By Candice Delmas

Oksana Shachko died on 23 July 2018. She co-founded the feminist socialist collective Femen in her native Ukraine ten years ago, to fight against patriarchy’s three central forms—dictatorship, the sexual exploitation of women, and established religion. One of Femen’s first protests was a guerrilla theater performance protesting sexual harassment at the university.

Multiple inheritances: how the art of Romare Bearden reflects 21st century identities

By Mary Schmidt Campbell

Bearden’s collages, which burst onto the art world scene in the fall of 1964, made a compelling aesthetic argument for multiple cultural inheritances. He called his vision “the Prevalence of Ritual,” and it was first manifest in Projections, black and white photographic blow ups of collages.

What would Margaret Cavendish say?

By Deborah Boyle

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was a philosopher, poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and she had opinions. Lots of them, on topics from the cause of thunder, to the qualities of a good book translator, to the value of diverse opinions themselves (her assessment on this last point: “Several Opinions, except it be in Religion, do no harm.”).

Philosopher of the Month: Arthur Schopenhauer [slideshow]

By Panumas King

This September, the OUP Philosophy honors Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) as the Philosopher of the Month. Schopenhauer was largely ignored by the academic philosophical community during his lifetime, but gained recognition and fame posthumously.

Changing migrants’ mindsets can improve their intercultural experiences

By Joshua Katz, Kimberly A. Noels, and Nigel Mantou Lou

Immigrants who are not fluent in the local language not only have trouble communicating, but may also feel that they don’t fit into the society in which they live, or that majority members might reject them due to their lack of fluency.

Do you know your Broadway show tune covers? [quiz]

By Laurence Maslon

Broadway musicals have enchanted America for decades, so much so that show tunes have made their way into popular culture via recordings by famous artists. These Broadway covers have launched these show tunes into legendary pop culture fame.

An archaeology of early radio production: doing sound historiography without the sound

By Shawn VanCour

What did early US radio sound like? During radio’s initial rise to prominence in the 1920s, before the “golden age” of network broadcasting in the 1930s and 1940s, what kinds of programming, production practices, and performance styles greeted audiences’ ears when they tuned into this new medium?

Revealing the past of childhood before history

By Robin Derricourt

Through most societies of the human past, children comprised half the community. Archaeologists and their collaborators are now uncovering many aspects of the young in societies of the deep past, too long the ‘hidden half’ of prehistory.

What type of choir director are you?

By Ashley Danyew

Think about the choir directors you’ve had in the past. What were they like? Each one likely had a different approach to leading, conducting, and communicating. What makes a great leader? Which communication style is most effective? Let’s begin with leadership style.

Religion and literature in a secular age

By Mark Knight

There is a long history of people exploring the relationship between religion and literature. We might go back to sacred texts from different traditions and think, for instance, about why there is such a vast array of literary forms in the Judaeo-Christian Bible.

Are casual hookups sexually empowering for college women?

By Jennifer Beste

Pursuing this question in conversation with undergraduates inside and outside of the classroom for over ten years, I have found that the vast majority of young women experience hookup culture as disempowering.

Is Punk (or any alternative culture) an antidote to authoritarian, neotraditionalist nationalism?

By Raymond Patton

April 30th this year marked the 40th anniversary of the massive Rock Against Racism rally and concert in London, at which some hundred thousand people marched into Victoria Park to the sound of punk and reggae bands, including X-Ray Spex, fronted by Afro-British Poly Styrene.

Fracturing landscapes: a history of fences on the U.S.-Mexico divide

By Mary E. Mendoza

In the short, roughly ten-mile stretch, I saw nearly twenty different fence designs made up of at least six different kinds of materials. In one place, there were four fences still standing; each fence representing some previous phase of construction and a stark reminder that Trump’s prototypes aren’t new at all, they are part of a long historical trend.

Long, short, and efficient titles for research articles

By David H. Foster

The title of a research article has an almost impossible remit. As the freely available representative of the work, it needs to accurately capture what was achieved, differentiate it from other works, and, of course, attract the attention of the reader, who might be searching a journal’s contents list or the return from a database query.