Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The 2023 award of the Nobel Prize for literature to the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse brings Norwegian literature into focus for English-speaking readers and provides a fresh angle from which to view the writings of Knut Hamsun.
It is amazing how many synonyms for “fool” exist! It is almost funny that fool, the main English word for “a stupid person,” is not native, says the Oxford Etymologist in this week’s exploration of the origins of fools.
On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we discuss the state of human infrastructure in the Anthropocene with a particular focus on how research can best be used to inform public policy. First, we welcomed Patrick Harris, co-editor-in-chief of the new transdisciplinary journal, Oxford Open Infrastructure and Health, to speak about the aims and […]
As the EU confronts multiple challenges, many question whether Germany has finally shed its reluctance to become a leading power in the region. In this blog post, Magnus G Schoeller and Olof Karlsson highlight the key obstacles standing in the way of Germany’s leadership aspirations, its policy implications, and how the country can overcome them.
Maryemma Graham on writing “The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker”, the complete, authorized biography of America’s first award-winning Black writer.
Some words are so rare that few people know and even fewer study them. Such is “brocard”, the “outcast” subject of today’s blog post from the Oxford Etymologist.
The value of the “Apostolic Fathers” is evident for a better understanding of the New Testament and the formative years of the “Jesus Movement” that came to be called Christianity. The Apostolic Fathers can help us measure our own understanding of that early phase of church history.
250 years ago, Ji Yun compiled one of the world’s largest premodern encyclopedias for the Chinese court. This fall Oxford University Press launches the first endowed bilingual translation library of Classical Chinese Literature thanks to a generous gift by Ji Yun’s descendant, Agnes Hsin-mei Hsu-Tang and her husband Oscar Tang.
On 23 February 2022, I drove back to Michigan after giving a talk at the University of Kentucky on genome diversity in Ukraine. My niece Zlata Bilanin, a recent college graduate from Ukraine, was with me. She was calling her friends in Kyiv, worried. A single question was on everyone’s mind: will there be a […]
Jonathan Wikeley explores Vaughan Williams’s “Four Last Songs”, looking at the textual meaning, the process of arranging for choir, and composer’s philosophy of “letting go” of the music.
In this blog post, we hear from OUP’s society publishing collaborators and the ways in which they support diverse communities, including through open access publishing.
The Oxford Etymologist casts a glance at a book exploring the history of language and its development that is “definitely worth reading.”
The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is “Community Over Commercialisation”. As part of this, we’re looking at different definitions of “community” used within academic research.
David Herd explores the language of human rights and why Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s recent pronouncement of human rights as a “luxury belief” is a shocking step even by the standards of contemporary political rhetoric.
In 2015 history was made when LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detected the first ever gravitational wave signal. This was an incredible technological achievement and the beginning of a completely new way of investigating the cosmos. The restart of LIGO and the global gravitational wave research network launches a new phase of deep space exploration.
Suppose it were suggested that animals’ interests would be even better protected if we recognized a right of political participation to animals. One way to do that would be to have human representatives cast votes on behalf of animals with respect to different legislative proposals.