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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Every year, on 1 April, the OUPblog team rack their brains for inspiration. We try to figure out if there is something else we should be doing, other than providing academic insights for the thinking world and daily commentary on nearly every subject under the sun. We should be creating new board-games based on literary figures.
By 1917, Americans increasingly became more concerned about the possible implications that would come with a German victory. With at-home values in mind, the United States presented propaganda to use as a call to action. The following slideshow portrays images of WWI propaganda used in the United States.
Thanksgiving has many historical roots in American culture. While it is typically a day spent surrounded by family and showing appreciation for what we are thankful for, we would all be lying if we did not admit that our favorite part is consuming an abundance of delicious food until we slip into a food coma.
Running from November 2016–April 2017, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts hosts the exhibition World War I and American Art. With over 150 works by American artists, this carefully curated exhibit is the first major exhibit to explore how American artists reacted to WWI.
Psalm 137 is the only one out of the 150 biblical psalms set in a particular time and place. The vivid tableau sketched by the opening lines has lent itself to visual representations over the millennia. Each interpretation brings something different to the story and shows the cultures which this psalm has touched.
Ireland is home to many great writers, from Bram Stoker and Jonathan Swift to Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. In this slideshow, Molly Grote, OUP publicist with a degree in British and Irish literature, takes us on a literary tour of Dublin.
We continue our reflection on 2016 with a more in depth look at the nominees for Place of the Year. Previously, we introduced our readers to the nominees simply as a list. Now, we’d like to go a bit more in-depth with each of the nominees.
Starting clinical rotations in hospital can be a daunting prospect, and with each new specialty you are asked to master new skills, knowledge, and ways of working. To help guide you through your rotations we have illustrated some of the different medical specialties, with brief introductions on how to not just survive, but also thrive in each.
Professor Lisa Webley of the University of Westminster has been named Law Teacher of the Year 2016, fending off strong competition from lecturers from Bangor, Leicester, Nottingham Trent, Oxford, and Sheffield Hallam. The prestigious national award, which is sponsored by Oxford University Press, was presented at the end of the inaugural Celebrating Excellence in Law Teaching conference held in Oxford on Friday 1 July 2016.
At this year’s OUP and BB National Mooting Competition, one of the UK’s most prestigious mooting competitions, the team of the University of Manchester was victorious. The original moot problem, written by barrister Ros Earis for the final, focused on whether or not a landlord was liable for an injury caused to his tenant by a broken paving stone close to the front door of the property, despite not being informed of the defect.
Last month, we were thrilled to see so many of you at ISA’s 57th Annual Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Being able to communicate with so many International Studies Association members from all different fields and backgrounds is an opportunity our OUP Staff looks forward to every year.
The 2016 Society for American Music (SAM) conference was held in Boston, where scholars and institutions from around the globe gathered together in a supportive and uplifting five-day meeting that consisted of panels, presentations, discussions, field trips, musical performances, receptions, and the celebration of books and authors.
In 2003 Paul Bahn led the team that discovered the first Ice Age cave art at Creswell Crags in Britain. In recent years, many more discoveries have been made including the expanding phenomenon of ‘open-air Ice Age art’. In the slideshow below, you can see some of the earliest examples of art on the planet, and take a tour of prehistoric art throughout the world.
Nineteenth and twentieth Century opera houses are finding new lives today. Opera houses were once the center of art, culture, and entertainment for rural American towns–when there was much less competition for our collective attention.
Brown v. Board of Education is one of the most identifiable civil rights cases in our nation’s history. While most scholarship begins with this case, Just Another Southern Town by Joan Quigley recounts the battle for civil rights beginning with the case of District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. In this slideshow, Joan Quigley weaves together the success of this case with other landmark civil rights moments in Washington, DC, creating a timeline of the struggle for racial justice in our nation’s capital.
When people think of evolution, many reflect on the concept as an operation filled with endless random possibilities–a process that arrives at advantageous traits by chance. But is the course of evolution actually random? In A World from Dust: How the Periodic Table Shaped Life, Ben McFarland argues that an understanding of chemistry can both explain and predict the course of evolution.