Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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.
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.
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 […]
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.”
We asked Henrik Schmidt, Licence Manager from the Research Collaboration Unit at the National Library of Sweden, for his views on open access and the transformation of the research environment.
In this blog post, we explore what OUP is doing to address the challenges to making open access publishing available to all and share information on the volume of articles we waive Article Processing Charges for each year.
Discover how OUP supports researchers at every career stage—including Early Career Researchers—through our journals publishing.
This year marks 400 years since the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, but why was he singled out for his lack of knowledge about classics, as well as his “illiteracy”?
Today, there are three dominant and competing models of digital regulation—the US, China, and the EU. Explore the nuances and implications of each model in the infographic.
The invasion of the Russian Federation in Ukraine on 24 January 2022 is certainly not the first, but one of the most blatant attacks on the international legal order and one of the order’s foundational values, namely peace. It has enlivened widespread debates about the end of the liberal world order and, closely related to this, a crisis of international law. But what does this crisis stand for?
Some words don’t interest anyone. They languish in their obscurity, and even lexicographers miss or ignore them. Yet they too deserve to get their day in court. One such word is “cowan.”
The Oxford Etymologist explores squash, squeeze, and the development of squ- words featuring the infamous s-mobile.
Was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which was inaugurated in January 1801, unique? It has certainly been uniquely recognised as the “United Kingdom,” or (more simply) the “UK.” But how far does this recognition reflect the UK’s exceptional multinational structures?