Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Whether you are looking to escape into the histories of some libraries or looking to expand your knowledge on the future of reading and research we’ve got something for every librarian with this reading list.
It is curious how often those who have tried to explain the origin of English idioms have referred to the occupation of printers. Regardless of their success, the attempts are worthy of note.
In the fall of 1999, another action movie came and went, garnering disappointed reviews and a pittance in ticket sales. Adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel “Eaters of the Dead”, The 13th Warrior offered a surprising premise.
Every year, I spend the semester with 50 college sophomores pondering two questions. The first one is: how have people in the past cared for the neediest people in their community? The second is: how should we?
We are one more week closer to Halloween, and pumpkins are ubiquitous. How did the pumpkin get its name?
Open research may be the route to surfacing a definitional framework for the monograph in SHAPE disciplines. Director of Open Access, Academic, at OUP Andy Redman explores why in this blog post:
To avert catastrophic climate change will require huge changes in energy, transportation, land use, urban systems, infrastructure, and industry, involving government, business, educational and research institutions, civil society, and the general public. None of these restructurings will be easy.
From its origins as an ancient Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest, over time Halloween has evolved into a day of trick-or-treating, scary films, costumes, and carving pumpkins.
How can a ghost (any ghost) get its name, and why is the etymology of bogymen, gremlins, goblins, and spooks usually unknown?
The outpouring of support for Afghan refugees since the fall of the Taliban a few weeks ago is laudable. As the author of two books on our obligations to refugees, many people have been asking me about how we should respond to this crisis and what we can hope for Afghan refugees. There’s both a lot we in the United States can do and a lot we should be worried about.
Symptoms of the looming climate crisis abound: 50-year extreme heat events happening every year, melting of polar ice sheets, forest fires that encircle the globe, tropical cyclones of greater size, intensity and, as was very evident in Ida’s recent visit to New York, unprecedented levels of precipitation.
Alongside the commemorations of the September 11 attacks, Americans marked twenty years since the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan. Scholars of international law still dispute whether the decision to invade Afghanistan was justified.
Winter is round the corner, and the best way to prepare for it is to read a few murky stories about the etymology of the relevant words: “ice” and “snow.”
Across the centuries, in paintings and eventually in photography, one of the most common subjects for representation has been the reader.
In this blog post, the Oxford Etymologist tackles questions from readers.
Coping with a global pandemic has laid bare the need for public trust in science. And there is good news and bad news when it comes to how likely the public is to trust science. Our work over the past ten years reveals that the public trusts science and that religious people seem to trust science as much as non-religious people. Yet, public trust in scientists as a people group is eroding in dangerous ways. And for certain groups who are particularly unlikely to trust scientists, the belief that all scientists are loud, anti-religious atheists is a part of their distrust.