Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The most important date is 1949, when the populous nations of China, India and Indonesia enfranchised women; that was 40 per cent of the world’s female population. What was driving these enfranchisements? The great movements of women’s suffrage, where tens of nations enfranchised in a few years, are associated with national solidarity and re-organisation.
This year was, once again, one of great political turmoil. The international legal order is not immune from the impact of the rise of populism and increasingly strained relations between many of the world’s most powerful states. A positive view is that we are witnessing a period of global re-adjustment. A more negative take is that there is a real risk of the fabric of the international legal order, created so carefully in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars, unravelling.
Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa will serve as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee during the upcoming 115th Congress. Senator Grassley’s decision to lead the Finance Committee may have important consequences for the nation’s colleges and universities.
One of the best parts of the holiday season is that everyone celebrates it in their own unique way. Some traditions have grown out of novelty, such as eating Kentucky Fried Chicken dinners on Christmas in Japan. Others date back centuries, like hiding your broom on Christmas Eve in Norway to prevent witches and evil spirits from stealing it to ride on.
Argentina’s rich history of 20th and 21st century social, political, and activist movements looms large in popular imagination and scholarly literature alike. Well-known images include the masses gathered in the Plaza de Mayo outside the iconic pink presidential palace during populist President Juan Domingo Perón’s first terms (1946-1955). This scene was imprinted in popular culture, for better or worse, by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita.
2018 marks the 325th anniversary of the publication of William Penn’s Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, which proposed, among other things, the establishment of a European Parliament.
Forty years ago, Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports and Virgin-EMI has just given it a deluxe vinyl re-issue. The first work to formally identify itself as “ambient,” it garnered modest attention and a bit of derision; Rolling Stone referred to it as “aesthetic white noise.”
Having sown my wild oats (see the post for December 12, 2018), I can now afford the luxury of looking at the origin of the word oat. It would be unfair to introduce the holiday season by discussing a word of unknown etymology. A Christmas carol needs a happy end, and indeed I have something reassuring to say.
Mexico is the 2018 Place of the Year, and we are celebrating its win. To get to know Mexico better, we asked our friends at OUP Mexico what they love most about their country. From fresh guacamole to the warmth of the people, their responses bring Mexico to life.
The unapologetic authoritarianism of guru-disciple relationship makes it a revealing case study through which to analyze power relations, particularly those related to physical touch and sexuality. As I argue in a recent article, “Guru Sex,” in the guru-disciple relationship there are social conventions surrounding touch, what I call haptic logics.
In mid-January, a group of divers from the Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM) project connected two underwater caverns in eastern Mexico, revealing what was believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet.
Paul Brown is best known for his work as an artist creating visual art that uses self-generating computational processes. Yet before Paul started creating art with computers, he worked with Nova Express, one of the main psychedelic light shows performing in Manchester and the North of England during the 1960s and early 1970s.
Within the brain, there are many different substructures, each connected by axons and dendrites to multiple other substructures. In the 1970’s, neuroanatomy courses meant memorizing something that looked as complicated as the New York City subway map.
The entrance of the United States into World War I on April 6, 1917 inspired a flood of new music from popular songwriters. Simultaneously, the first recording of instrumental jazz was released in April 1917, touching off a fad for the new style and inspiring record companies to promote other artists before year’s end.
For many years I have been studying not only the derivation and history of words but also the origin of idioms. No Indo-European forms there, no incompatible vowels, not consonant shifts, but the problems are equally tough.
The US Constitution declares itself to be “the supreme law of the land.” Unfortunately, the meaning of the constitutional text is not always clear. Consider the abortion case Roe v. Wade.