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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The story of Afong Moy, the first known Chinese woman on American soil, and the first Chinese person to come face to face with American audiences across the country has been told recently by both the historian Nancy Davis as well as the playwright LLoyd Suh. Davis explores Afong Moy’s life and the different lessons that can be learned through research as well as fictionalization.
The abstract of a research article has a simple remit: to faithfully summarize the reported research. After the title, it’s the most read section of the article. Crucially, it makes the case to the reader for reading the article in full. Alas, not all abstracts succeed.
To mark the 80th anniversary of the first transport to Theresienstadt on 24 November 1941, scholar Anna Hájková explores the social relations that formed within Nazi camps.
The full story of prohibition—one you’ve probably never been told—is perhaps one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. Discover 20 key figures from history that you didn’t know were prohibitionists.
America’s World War II military was a force of unalloyed good. While saving the world from Nazism, it also managed to unify a famously fractious American people. At least that’s the story many Americans have long told themselves… But the reality is starkly different. The military built not one color line, but a complex tangle […]
Innovations in open research can help to address disinformation, making a wider range of information accessible and available, ensuring reproducibility, and facilitating reuse.
Every year, I spend the semester with 50 college sophomores pondering two questions. The first one is: how have people in the past cared for the neediest people in their community? The second is: how should we?
Open research may be the route to surfacing a definitional framework for the monograph in SHAPE disciplines. Director of Open Access, Academic, at OUP Andy Redman explores why in this blog post:
As a mission-driven university press, we strongly support the opening up of research and the benefits for access and inclusion that OA brings. We want to ensure that the transition towards open research is an inclusive process—to use the title of OA week, “it matters how we open knowledge.”
From its origins as an ancient Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest, over time Halloween has evolved into a day of trick-or-treating, scary films, costumes, and carving pumpkins.
Certain battles acquire iconic status in history. The victors have been celebrated as heroes for centuries, the vanquished serve as a cautionary tale for all, and nations use these triumphs to establish their founding myths. These battles are commemorated in paintings, verse and music, marked by monumental memorials, and used as the way points for the periodisation of history.
Fannie Lou Hamer was a galvanizing force of the Civil Rights movement, using her voice to advance voting rights and representation for Black Americans throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Faced with eviction, arrests, and abuse at the hands of white doctors, policemen, and others, Hamer stayed true to her faith and her conviction in non-violent […]
To observe UK Black History Month, we have curated a collection of Oxford Dictionary of National Biography articles exploring the lives of people of Black/African descent who had an impact on, or a connection to, the UK during their lifetime and the ways in which they made history.
This blog post looks at five peer review models currently in use, describing what they mean for authors, reviewers and editors, and examines the various benefits and consequences of each.
Romans sometimes worried that you couldn’t tell enslaved and free people apart. By the second century CE, many senators were descended from Gauls and Iberians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and Syrians—the very peoples Romans had conquered as they extended their empire. So, was the Roman empire unusually inclusive? Or even a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic civilization? None of that seems very likely.
When planning a trip to Italy, the major cities of Rome, Florence, Milan and Venice are usually on the must-see list. Yet many people also yearn to find the “undiscovered hidden gem” waiting to be explored. For the latter group, Molise is waiting. This region is so underrated that Italians have a running joke: “Il Molise non esiste” (“Molise doesn’t exist”).