Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
On Saturday 7 September 2013, lovers of classical music will gather together once again for the final performance in this year’s momentous Proms season. Alongside the traditional pomp and celebration of the Last Night, with Rule, Britannia!, Jerusalem, and the like, we are promised a number of more substantial works, including Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the overture to Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg.
By Karen Nelson-Field
Why is it when a new media platform comes along that everything we know about how advertising works and how consumers behave seems to go out the window? Because the race to discovery means that rigorous research with duplicated results are elusive.
By Stephen E. Mawdsley
In 1980, public health researchers working in the United Republic of Cameroon detected a startling trend among children diagnosed with paralytic polio. Some of the children had become paralyzed in the limb that had only weeks before received an inoculation against a common pediatric illness.
By Jennifer Moore
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 do not justify missile strikes in Syria. The humanitarian principle of distinction requires that military force is used without indiscriminately targeting civilians, but does not sanction the use of force itself. International humanitarian law thus governs the conduct of war but not its initiation.
By Sónia Cruz
“Crawling leaves” or “solar-powered sea slugs” are common terms used to name some species of sacoglossan sea slugs capable of performing photosynthesis, a process usually associated with plants. These sea slugs ingest macroalgal tissue and retain undigested functional chloroplasts in special cells of their gut (kleptoplasty). The “stolen” chloroplasts (kleptoplasts) continue to photosynthesize, in some cases up to one year.
By Douglas Bruster
Why should we think that Shakespeare wrote lines first published in the 1602 quarto of The Spanish Tragedy, a then-classic play by his deceased contemporary Thomas Kyd? Our answer starts 180 years ago, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge—author of ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—said he heard Shakespeare in this material.
The historic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 may have buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under a thick carpet of volcanic ash, but it preserved what is surely our most valuable archaeological record of daily life in Ancient Rome to date.
By Gordon R. Thompson
As the summer of 1963 drew to a close and students prepared to return to school, the Beatles released what may have been their most successful single. “She Loves You” would top the British charts twice that year, remain near the top for months, and help to launch the band into the American consciousness.
By Jay Albanese
We’ve divided our planet into nearly 200 countries with sovereign borders and laws designed to preserve mutual self-interest. It is not surprising, therefore, that many countries are suspicious of their cross-border neighbors and sometimes outwardly hostile to them. Simply put, the adage “good fences make good neighbors” applies on the international scene as well.
By Justine McConnell
The death of Martin Bernal in June attracted less media attention than one might have hoped for the man who brought an unprecedented attention to the contemporary study of Classics. His 1987 work, Black Athena, was not the first to argue for a strong, pervasive African influence on the culture of ancient Greece, but it was the first to receive widespread notice.
Compiled by Sonia Tsuruoka
Fading tans and falling temperatures mean it’s that time of year again. As the new academic term approaches, the annual Back to School frenzy has kicked into high-gear, with parents and students of all ages rushing to complete last-minute mall runs and Staples trips in preparation.
By Scott Trudell
In the opening shots of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, a pair of khaki pants is suspended, for a tranquil moment, in the desert air. The pants are then unceremoniously run over by an RV methamphetamine lab with two murdered bodies in back. When the camper crashes into a ditch, the driver Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) gets out.
By Rosemary Nagy
In Canada, there are almost 600 documented cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women over the last twenty years. The Canadian government has continuously refused to hold a national public inquiry into the missing and murdered women, despite mounting international and domestic pressure to do so.
We don’t often discuss book awards on the OUPblog, but this year the inaugural British Academy Medals were awarded to three authors and their titles published by Oxford University Press: Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, edited by Noel Malcolm; The Organisation of Mind by Tim Shallice and Rick Cooper; and The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia (USA only).
Seventy years ago today, in the late afternoon of Sunday 25 July 1943, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini went for what he imagined was a fairly routine audience with the Italian king. The war had been going badly for Italy: two weeks earlier US, Canadian and British forces had landed in Sicily, and met with little resistance. And the previous evening a number of senior fascists had passed a motion calling on the king to assume full military command.
By Heidi Moawad
Is work-life balance consistent with professional ambition? A recent study concludes that young women are now proclaiming that they don’t want to be leaders. Does this data suggest that young women who do want to be leaders should not bother to ‘lean in’ by acquiring expert level knowledge, attaining specialized skills and pursuing experience-building work projects when they have the opportunity?