Arts & Humanities

Daniel Defoe, Londoner

By David Roberts
Defoe is often described as a realist. Ian Watt’s seminal book, The Rise of the Novel, went so far as make his ‘realism’ a pre-condition for the development of the novel. But when it came to cities, and to London in particular, Defoe was often drawn to ghosts and shadows: to dreams of emptiness as much as crowds and the great business of daily life. As Edward Hopper found the essence of New York in stray people hunched over night-time drinks amid darkened streets, so the London of Defoe’s writing often turns out to be an inversion of the place his readers knew, perhaps because he knew it better than anyone else.

Whose Magic Flute is it, anyway?

By William Gibbons
One of Mozart’s most enduringly popular operas, The Magic Flute has captivated audiences since its premiere in Vienna in 1791. Centered on the struggles of the heroic Prince Tamino, his beloved Pamina, and the wise Sarastro (with help and comic relief from the birdcatcher Papageno) against the Queen of the Night, we know The Magic Flute as a classic tale of the battle between good and evil, or perhaps between enlightenment and ignorance.

More than virtual: real community, many ways of connecting

By Karen Dill-Shackleford
Mike was a doctoral student profoundly appreciated and esteemed by faculty, peers, staff, and all who came in contact with him. As is typical in our community, Mike was already a successful mid-career professional. He worked in the tech world and brought his expertise to us. He didn’t have a background in research psychology, but in the last year of his doctoral program, his work was published on nine occasions.

Editing an encyclopedia

By Dr. David Milne
When I was invited to review the second volume of Odd Arne Westad’s and Melvyn Leffler’s The Cambridge History of the Cold War in 2010, I compared the enterprise to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie — which I intended both as a compliment and as a criticism. Sweeping in its coverage, the Encyclopédie aimed to capture the main currents of Enlightenment thinking.

Happy Birthday William Shakespeare!

We are celebrating Shakespeare’s 449th birthday with a quiz! Test your knowledge on the famous bard. Can you tell your poems from your plays? Do you know who his twins were named after, or his exact birthdate? Find out answers to these and much more in our quiz. Break a leg!

Workplace mobbing: add Ann Curry to its slate of victims

By Maureen Duffy
Journalists want to report the news not be the news. But in the case of Ann Curry, the former Today show co-host who was pushed into stepping down from the co-anchor slot last June, she has become the news. New York Times reporter Brian Stelter’s recent feature article about morning television and the toxic culture at NBC’s Today show provides more than enough information to conclude that Ann Curry was a target of workplace mobbing.

Sacred groves

By Eliza F. Kent
In 1967, the historian Lynn White, Jr., published a ground-breaking essay proposing that values embedded in Christianity had helped to legitimize the despoliation of the earth. Writing three years before the first Earth Day, White argued in “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” that Biblical cosmologies granted moral sanction to our unrestrained exploitation of natural resources

A sharer’s feast: Shakespeare’s birthday party 398 years on

By Bart van Es
April 23rd 1564, or a day or two earlier, saw the birth of William Shakespeare, and on that same day fifty-two years later, also in Stratford, he died. This congruence of dates lends some credibility to the account given by the local vicar many years later of the way the playwright spent his final hours: ‘Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.’

Oxford University Press at the BBC Proms 2013

By Lucy Allen

Every year, around mid-April, music lovers await the news that the BBC proms schedule has been announced. We look forward to the old favourites, the new commissions, the excited atmosphere, and some of the best performers in the world. When summer arrives, scores of people—young and old alike—travel to London to visit the Royal Albert Hall and be part of this great British tradition.

Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey

15 April 2013 marked the fifth Jackie Robinson Day, commemorating the 66th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, an event which broke baseball’s racial barrier. In each game that is now played on 15 April, all players wear Jackie Robinson’s iconic #42 (also the title of a new film on Robinson). Thirty years ago, historian and ardent baseball fan Jules Tygiel proposed the first scholarly study of integration in baseball, shepherded by esteemed Oxford editor, Sheldon Meyer: Baseball’s Great Experiment.

A day in the life of a London marathon runner

By Daniel ‘pump those knees’ Parker and Debbie ‘fists of fury’ Sims
Pull on your lycra, tie up your shoelaces, pin your number on your vest, and join us as we run the Virgin London Marathon in blog form. While police and security have been stepping up after Boston, we have been trawling Oxford University Press’s online resources in order to bring you 26 miles and 375 yards of marathon goodness. Get ready to take your place on the starting line.

Singing in a choir is like knitting and bingo

By Barbara Stuart
Joining a choir is all the rage and some say that choir memberships are getting younger. It’s like knitting and bingo — it’s cool to sing in a choir. Not in the choirs around here, not yet! Every English choral society has its stalwarts; ladies (sadly mostly ladies — there are never enough men) who run the committee, enjoy a frisson with the young(ish) conductor, share lifts, and find friendship.

Sympathy in modernist literature

By Kirsty Martin
In Virginia Woolf’s 1931 modernist novel ‘The Waves’ her character Neville, looking around in a chapel service at school, is suddenly transfixed by his friend Percival: “But look – he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.” Neville is captivated, and overwhelmed, by Percival’s gesture here. Capturing this moment, Woolf’s language becomes gesturative too…