Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) was celebrated during his lifetime as the greatest European writer on the arts. The architect Sir John Soane admired his essay on Egyptian architecture while Hegel considered his research on ancient Greek polychromatic sculpture a masterpiece. Despite the breadth of Quatremère’s writings, today he is famous for inventing an idea […]
I miss a lot of things about the decline of paper newspapers, especially the comic strips. The comics were verbal humor with pictures and recurring characters, and the language of the comics provided a window into how spoken language was represented in print.
I wrote a biography of John Williams, essentially, because I have loved his music since I was nine years old.
Prague is a city steeped in history, where music has long been intertwined with its cultural identity. This playlist captures that spirit, featuring compositions that reflect the grandeur of its imperial courts, the struggles of its people, and the resilience of its artists.
A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracies Theories,” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena.
Two notes. Probably the most famous two-note unit of music in modern history.
When a composer has a hit song or an instantly iconic tune, it can be a blessing and a curse. That tune becomes eternally attached to you—and sometimes it can eclipse the rest of your work.
As the days get cooler and autumn approaches, it’s the perfect time for a fresh start. Back to school is here.
Every September, caregivers and kids alike prepare for one big change: the start of a new school year.
In the 1940s, the Normandie was the epitome of elegance and engineering—a French ocean liner renowned for its Art Deco splendor and unmatched luxury.
In conducting research for The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, Kathleen B. Casey discovered how one everyday object—the purse—could function as a portal to the past.
It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name.
I often tell my students that biology has become a data-driven field. Certainly, there’s a general sense that methods related to biological sequences (that is methods in genomics and bioinformatics) have become very widespread. But what does that really mean?
Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together.
The advent of the World Wide Web in the turn of the last century completely transformed the way most people find and absorb information. Rather than a world in which information is stored in books or housed in libraries, we have a world where all of the information in the world is accessible to everyone.
A while ago, a reader pointed me to a comment on another writer’s OUPblog piece. The comment complained about a caption on a photo, an image of the painting “Adam and Eve in Paradise” by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger.
Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen introduced the mystery of quantum entanglement (entanglement) in 1935 and it has been called “Einstein’s quantum riddle.” Many physicists and philosophers in foundations of quantum mechanics (foundations) have proposed solutions to Einstein’s quantum riddle, but no solution has received consensus support, which has led some to call entanglement “the greatest mystery in physics.”