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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The Civil War is one of the seminal moments in US history. New research continues to illuminate how we understand both the events of the war and how its legacy continues to impact our modern world.
Now the dust has settled on another eventful year, it’s time to look back on some of the words that characterised 2022.
The Oxford Etymologist explores the unfinished story of the word “begin”.
When Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Uncle Silas” appeared in 1864, its author was best known as the proprietor of the Dublin University Magazine and a writer of Irish historical novels. Yet, as advised by his publisher, Le Fanu had produced a work of fiction situated not in the Irish past but the English present.
English noun phrases have something called a “temporal interpretation.” That’s linguist-speak for how we understand their place in time relative to the tense of the verb.
Chaplains tend to fly below the radar with little attention outside of emergency situations. Their work has long been an important part of the care religious leaders provide across the country.
In this blog post, the Oxford Etymologist responds to questions from readers on word borrowing across Hebrew, Greek, and Germanic, plus a few new etymology ideas.
The Grove Music Online spoof article contest is now open for 2023!
Amid the current economic crises, how do we recover? How can we address such financial distress and inequity, and how might we go about enacting more permanent resolution? Listen to Christopher Howard and Tom Malleson on The Oxford Comment podcast.
In a speech to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2022, President Biden called on the UN to stand in solidarity with Ukraine. At least 1,000 companies have left Russia because of Putin’s brutal unprovoked war on Ukraine. Some companies left because of sanctions. Others left for moral reasons, often under pressure from investors, consumers, and out of […]
The fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage has recently been published by OUP. I was happy to talk to Bryan Garner—who was declared a “genius” by the late David Foster Wallace—about what it means to write a usage dictionary.
Around three years into his career as a dramatist, Shakespeare’s blank verse—his unrhymed iambic pentameter—came under attack. We might wonder whether the passage from “Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit” was right?
Some words propagate like mushrooms: no roots but a sizable crowd of upstarts calling themselves relatives. Gr-words are the pet subject of all works on sound imitation and sound symbolism.
As that rare creature—an American woman who, defining herself as a choreographer and ballet director, amassed a degree of power and prestige and exerted aesthetic prerogatives—Ruth Page’s life and work offer refreshing paradigms for the twenty-first century.
The American author James Purdy has long been considered a “lost” figure in literary studies, but he has always enjoyed a certain cult following among artists and writers interested in the fringes of society. Michael Snyder details how Purdy began making the connections that would carry him through his career.
Reading literature has us think differently, with a subtler emotional lexicon. Explore three case studies into reading for identity, expression, and mental health from the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature, and Society (CRILS).