Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
From the Harlem Rag to grand pianos to the Grammy awards to the international stage… Jazz has had many different incarnations since its origins 120 years ago. This brief slideshow with images from Mervyn Cooke’s The Chronicle of Jazz conveys the diversity of change in jazz performers throughout the years. Innovation, experimentation, controversy, and emotion — all found in the most imaginative and enduring music.
Spoiler Alert: This article includes plot details from the film. Watching Gravity as a professor who teaches child psychology, I could not help but see the developmental themes that resonate with this film. One of the luminous images that lingered with me long after the film ended is the scene in which Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is nestled in the safety of a spacecraft following a grueling battle for her life.
In a world of 9.1 billion people… where 61% of the world’s population lives in urban centers… primarily with coastal cities as magnets of growth… and the people within these cities becoming ever more connected… with mobile phones as tools for destruction…
By Adrian Bardon
In the early 5th century BCE a group of philosophers from the Greek colony of Elea formed a school of thought devoted to the notion that sense perception — as opposed to reason — is a poor guide to reality. The leader of this school was known as Parmenides.
By Erik N. Jensen
Let’s get one thing straight about Andy Murray’s Wimbledon singles title: It was not the first one by a Briton in 77 years, despite what the boisterous headlines might have you believe. London’s venerable Times set the tone on July 8 with its proclamation, “Murray ends 77-year wait for British win.”
By Sonia Tsuruoka
Not much remains to be said about the politics of the written word: scores of historical biographers have examined the literary appetites of revolutionaries, and how what they read determined how they interpreted the world. Mohandas Gandhi read Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience during his two-month incarceration in South Africa.
By Claude Rawson
Jonathan Swift, whom T. S. Eliot called “colossal,” “the greatest writer of English prose, and the greatest man who has ever written great English prose,” died on 19 October 1745.
By Mitch Kachun
Like many scholars who study nineteenth century African American history and literature, I am excited by the attention surrounding the newly released film, 12 Years a Slave, based on the experiences of Solomon Northup, a free black man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery.
By Jill L. Levensen
In its fall preview issue for 2013 (dated 2-9 September), New York magazine lists Romeo and Juliet with other films opening on 11 October 2013, and it comments: “Julian Fellowes (the beloved creator of Downton Abbey) tries to de-Luhrmann-ize this classic.” The statement makes two notable points.
What is your earliest musical memory? How has it formed your creativite impulse? Jeanna Bamberger’s research focuses on cognitive aspects of music perception, learning, and development, so when it came to reviewing her work, she thought of her own earliest musical experiences. The following is an adapted extract from Discovering the musical mind: A view of creativity as learning by Jeanne Bamberger.
By Mark Lawrence
Food fortification, that is the addition of one or more nutrients to a food whether or not they are normally contained in the food, is receiving much attention as a potential solution for preventing or correcting a demonstrated nutrient deficiency. It is a powerful technology for rapidly increasing the nutrient intake of populations. Political agendas and technological capacities are combining to significantly increase the number of staple foods that are being fortified, the number of added nutrients they contain and their reach.
Today marks the publication of the fifth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations under the editorship of broadcaster and former MP Gyles Brandreth. But who is the wittiest of them all?
By Anna-Lise Santella
After nearly a decade of work, the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music—often called AmeriGrove—is finished. In September 2013, shortly before publication, I talked with Editor in Chief Charles Hiroshi Garrett about the project.
By Damien McCallig
Through the use of email, social media, and other online accounts, our lives and social interactions are increasingly mediated by digital service providers. As the volume of these interactions increases and displaces traditional forms of communication and commerce the question of what happens to those accounts, following the death of the user, takes on greater significance.
By Tim Kendall
One of the anthologist’s greatest pleasures comes from discovering previously unknown pieces to jostle with the familiar classics. Editing The Poetry of the First World War, I knew that I should need to accommodate ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘The Soldier’, and ‘For the Fallen’. Whatever their qualities, these have become so inextricably part of our understanding that to omit them would be perverse.
By Eleanor Ty
In the early 1790s, Mary Hays was a rising writer who had published an Oriental tale, an essay on the usefulness of public worship, and, with her sister, produced a collection of essays on miscellaneous topics: romances, friendships, and improvements to female education. She admired and had befriended radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and was introduced to the circle of London intellectuals in the 1790s.