Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
To celebrate the publication of the first three volumes of The History of Oxford University Press on Thursday and University Press Week, we’re sharing various materials from our Archive and brief scholarly highlights from the work’s editors and contributors. To begin, we’d like to introduce a silent film made in 1925 by the Federation of British Industry.
By Anjan Chatterjee
Facing The City painted by Léger in 1919 can be an overwhelming experience. Geometry of bright colors, bits of human figures, mechanical structures, columns, stairs, lettering all crowd the painting and beyond into an immersive experience.
By John van Wyhe
The year 2013 is the centenary of the death of the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, best-known as the man who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection independently of Charles Darwin.
By Istvan Hargittai
The Los Alamos National Laboratory came to life in 1943 as the concluding segment of the Manhattan Project to produce the atomic bombs for the US Army. In August 1945, these bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In honor of Oxford’s 20th edition of the acclaimed Atlas of the World, we put together a longlist of 20 places around the globe for our yearly Place of the Year competition. The votes have been tallied, the geography committee has provided their essential input, and the shortlist nominees have been decided upon.
On Sunday 29 July 2013, we headed off to Wallacea for three weeks to assist comedian Bill Bailey with a documentary he is presenting about Alfred Russel Wallace. George, the Natural History Museum’s Curator of Orthopteroid Insects, acted as the Historical Consultant.
The gravity of the Milky Way Galaxy is tearing the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy apart. Stars ripped out of the tiny galaxy have ended up in a stream, which wraps around our own much heavier galaxy.
By Roger Luckhurst
As Lisa Morton notes in her excellent Trick or Treat? A History of Halloween (2013), our annual festival of spooks is a typical result of messy history and cultural confusion. It entered modern English culture as a misunderstanding of the three-day Celtic new year celebration in Ireland, which started at sunset on the 31st of October, to mark summer’s end.
In anticipation of Argentina’s mid-term elections to be held on Sunday, 27 October 2013, Political Analysis co-editor R. Michael Alvarez (Caltech) discussed some of the most important things that we need to know about this contest with Francisco Cantu (University of Houston) and Sebastian Saiegh (UCSD).
By David C. Catling
Over 2,300 years ago, in his book De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle asked if other Earth-like worlds exist and dismissed the idea. But now, remarkably, the question is on the verge of being answered scientifically. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, has collected data on the statistical occurrence of small planets that orbit stars at a distance where it’s the right temperature for liquid water and conceivably life.
By Andrew Pettinger
I was recently invited by Oxford University Press (OUP) to have my book, The Republic in Danger, published on the online open access library OAPEN. After a few general questions, I happily accepted. Why?
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 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.
Here at OUP, at the end of each year, we look back at the places around the globe (and beyond) which have been at the center of historic events. In conjunction with the publication of the Oxford Atlas of the World, 20th Edition, today we launch the Place Of The Year (POTY) 2013.
By Jim Baggott
Earlier today the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to English theorist Peter Higgs and Belgian François Englert, for their work on the ‘mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles’. This work first appeared in a series of research papers published in 1964.
By Stephen R. Wilk
When reporting on the origin of that science fiction cliché, the ray gun or death ray, most histories cite H.G. Wells’ classic story The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in Pearson’s Magazine between April and December of 1897. Wells was undoubtedly one of the founders of science fiction, striving to create original situations and ideas.