Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Jeremy Begbie
On my office wall I keep two photos together in a single frame. They show two teachers who inspired me more than any others—my first theology teacher, James Torrance (1923–2003), and next to him the American conductor, composer and pianist, Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990).
By Dr. Jingmai O’Connor
Understanding the internal organs of extinct animals over 100 million years old used to belong in the realm of impossibility. However, during recent decades exceptional discoveries from all over the world have revealed elusive details such as fossilized feathers, skin, and muscle.
By Colleen Manassa
The origins of Egyptian literary fiction can be found in the rollicking adventure tales and sober instructional texts of the early second millennium BCE. Tales such as the Story of Sinuhe, one of the classics of Egyptian literature, enjoyed a robust readership throughout the second millennium BCE as Egypt transitioned politically from the strongly centralized state of the Middle Kingdom…
By Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
How much repetition is too much repetition? How high would the number of plays of your favorite track on iTunes have to climb before you found it embarrassing? How many times could a song repeat the chorus before you stopped singing along and starting eyeing the radio suspiciously? And why does musical repetition often lead to bliss instead of exhaustion?
How high would the number of plays of your favorite track on iTunes have to climb before you found it embarrassing? How many times could a song repeat the chorus before you stopped singing along and starting eyeing the radio suspiciously?
The internet has come a long way since the first “electronic mail” was sent back in 1971… but with its rapid advancement come challenges to cybersecurity and the increasing threat of cyberterrorism, both on an individual level as well as on a larger global scale. In their new book, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, experts P.W. Singer and Allan Friedman warn us that we may not be as secure online as we think we are.
With over 30,000 media reports and academic studies on the dangers of cyberterrorism, surely the threat today could not be greater? But as P.W. Singer, author of the bestselling Wired for War and co-author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, points out — not a single person has died in a cyberterror attack.
By David King Dunaway
In the late 1950s, Dave Van Ronk was walking through Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village on a Sunday afternoon. This Trotskyist-leaning jazz enthusiast from Queens thought the crowds huddled around guitars and banjos “irredeemably square.”
By Eldar Sarajlic
Public controversies over non-therapeutic infant circumcision have become frequent occurrences in our time. Recently, an Israeli religious court fined a mother of a one-year-old for refusing to circumcise her son. We all remember last year’s circumcision controversy in Germany.
By Simon Eliot
In 1901 it was calculated that Oxford University Press took in more than twice the tonnage of material that it sent out, much of the difference being accounted for by coal and machinery. The efficiency of coal was not a new concern in the printing industry. In 1880, Edward Pickard Hall, then responsible for printing Bibles at the Press, had compiled a list of the ‘Evaporative power of Different Coals’ in a notebook and had concluded that ‘Nixon’s Steam Navigation’ at 13.45 was distinctly more efficient than ‘Wyekam’ coal at 11.42.
By Phillip John Usher
British comedian Eddie Izzard — known for his Francophilia and for performing standup in French and in France — once made a quip during a show in New York that at first seemed rather Franco-sceptic: why, he asked, do we talk about the “Renaissance” using a word of French origin when France itself had no such moment of Re-birth?
By Tom Fisher and Nicolas P. Maffei
What attracts us to objects? Why does ‘bling’ catch our eye, albeit superficially? Why do we value the glow of patina? While all of our senses aid our first contact with material and form, arguably, it is the visual qualities of an object’s surface that first draws us in.
By Scott Huntington
Why should people bother to study music history or, for that matter, go on to major in it? What could you possibly gain from studying music history? The answer to these questions might surprise you.
By Daniel Donaghy
During the movie awards season, Steve McQueen’s new film 12 Years a Slave will inspire discussions about its realistic depiction of slavery’s atrocities (Henry Louis Gates Jr. has already called it, “most certainly one of the most vivid and authentic portrayals of slavery ever captured in a feature film.”) and the points at which the film most clearly reflects and departs from Solomon Northup’s original narrative.
By John Louth
One of the questions we are asked most frequently as university press editors is whether and how our work has changed to accommodate digital publishing. That can be taken to refer to a wide range of changes, but if we mean the digital publication of scholarly monographs, the answer, thankfully, is “not much”.
On the first day of class in my ‘Psychology of Music’ course, I often ask students to create their own musical instruments. The catch is… they have to make them out of whatever they happen to have in their backpacks and pockets that day!
The 5 December 2013 live broadcast of The Sound of Music became a ratings giant despite withering reviews from armchair critics everywhere. “Hate watchers” Twittered their derision with relish, while NBC laughed all the way to the bank. What was the draw?