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SHAPE

SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

By SHAPE team

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

Native conquistadors: the role of Tlaxcala in the fall of the Aztec empire

By David M. Carballo

The Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, leading to the collapse of the Aztec empire, would have been impossible were it not for the assistance provided by various groups of Native allies who sensed the opportunity to upend the existing geopolitical order to something they thought would be to their advantage. No group was more critical to these alliances than the Tlaxcaltecs.

Jazz on a Summer's Day

Inspiring women in jazz, with Nikki Iles

By Nikki Iles

As a teenager, I took clarinet and piano lessons at the Royal Academy of Music on Saturdays. I always particularly loved the chamber groups and small group music-making, so in some ways, it’s no surprise that I ended up in the jazz world! My dad was a semi-pro jazz drummer and I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by the music of Oscar Peterson, Nat Cole, Frank Sinatra, Ella and George Shearing as I grew up.

What everyone needs to know about 2021 thus far

By Sarah Fabian

The year 2020 posed myriad challenges for everyone and now that we have reached the mid-way point of 2021, it is clear that, although the crises are not yet fully averted, the year thus far has already boasted some encouraging events.

Empire of Ruins

Let’s raise our taxes! Infrastructure and the American character

By Miles Orvell

If the infrastructure—roads, rails, water, and sewer lines—is the foundation of our economy, we are living on ruins and on borrowed time. The fragility of our infrastructure symbolizes the failure of a national ideology that has submerged public welfare under an ocean of private interests.

The Legacy of Racism for Children

“Stop acting like a child”: police denial of Black childhood

By Keaton Carr, Malia Metelues, Kirsten Spears, and Margaret C. Stevenson

On 29 January 2021, Rochester police responded to an incident involving a Black nine-year-old girl, who they were told might be suicidal. An extended police body camera video of the incident shows the agitated child, her mother, and an officer attempting to de-escalate the situation.

The Realness of Things Past

Have humans always lived in a “pluriverse” of worlds?

By Greg Anderson

In the modern West, we take it for granted that reality is an objectively knowable material world. From a young age, we are taught to visualize it as a vast abstract space full of free-standing objects that all obey timeless universal laws of science and nature. But a very different picture of reality is now emerging from new currents of thought in fields like history, anthropology, and sociology.

The VSI podcast season two: Homer, film music, consciousness, samurai, and more

By The VSI Podcast Team

Listen to season two of The VSI Podcast for concise and original introductions to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves.

A Roman road trip: tips for travelling the Roman Empire this summer

By Kimberly Cassibry

As Europe reopens, consider a Roman road trip that takes inspiration from an ancient travel guide. The Vicarello itineraries describe what we might call the scenic route from Cádiz to Rome. Glimpses of the empire’s superlative architecture can be found along the way, and emerging digital tools can put primary sources at your fingertips.

Whitman and the America yet to be: reconceptualizing a multiracial democracy

By Kenneth M. Price

In this OUPblog, Kenneth M. Price explores American poet Walt Whitman and what has often seemed to many to be a loss of Whitman’s early political and poetic radicalism after the war, and how it can be better understood as his own effort to reconceptualize a multiracial democracy.

Passion's Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind

Shakespeare and the sciences of emotion

By Benedict S. Robinson

What role should literature have in the interdisciplinary study of emotion? The dominant answer today seems to be “not much.” Scholars of literature of course write about emotion; but fundamental questions about what emotion is and how it works belong elsewhere: to psychology, cognitive science, neurophysiology, philosophy of mind. In Shakespeare’s time the picture was different. What the period called “passions” were material for ethics and for that part of natural philosophy dealing with the soul; but it was rhetoric that offered the most extensive accounts of the passions.

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction

Where have you gone, Jimmy Gatz? Roman Catholic haunting in American literary modernism

By Thomas J. Ferraro

The year is 1924: the restriction acts designed to turn the tide of Eastern and Southern European immigration into a trickle have been signed into US law. However, nativist panic continues apace. In quick succession three titans of US literary modernism weigh in, each with the novel still judged their best: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1926), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926).

How well do you know Louis Armstrong? [Quiz]

By OUP Music

With a career that spanned five decades and different eras in jazz, Louis Armstrong is perhaps one of the best-known jazz musicians. Test your knowledge of this influential entertainer with our quiz.

Shakespeare and East Asia

Adapting Shakespeare: shattering stereotypes of Asian women onstage and onscreen

By Alexa Alice Joubin

There has always been some perceived affinity between the submissive Ophelia and East Asian women. Ophelia is a paradox in world literature. Even when she appears to depend on others for her thoughts like her Western counterpart, the Ophelias in Asian adaptations adopt some rhetorical strategies to make themselves heard, balancing between eloquence and silence, shattering the stereotypes about docile Asian women.

Whose streets? The picturesque, Central Park, and the spaces of American democracy

By John Evelev

Last summer, during the “Black Lives Matter” protests in US cities galvanized by the murder of George Floyd, it was common to hear marchers chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” In some instances, police seeking to break up the protests also took up this chant, an ironic retort to the crowd’s claim to political power. These contesting claims to possession of the city streets framed a conflict over social representation in contemporary US life: “whose streets” are they really

Listening as a way to manage stage fright

By Julie Jaffee Nagel

It is as important for music teachers to listen to what music students and performers say as to the music they play. The incident I am about to describe further opened my eyes and ears.