Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The inter-war Oxford Book of Carols (published in 1928) was the brainchild of Reverend Percy Dearmer—a socialist, high church Anglican liturgist who believed that music should be at the core of Christian worship. Today the OBC is a world-renowned publication that shines as as a beacon of experimentation within tradition: a visionary musico-poetic collection of the most profoundly partisan nature.
Despite the visibility of attacks in media reports, problems encountered by NGOs in conflict zones remain an under-researched and undervalued issue that deserves more attention.
Words, as linguistics tells us, are conventional signs. Some natural phenomenon is called rain or snow, and, if you don’t know what those words mean, you will never guess. But everything in our consciousness militates against such a rupture between word and thing.
A history of the first ‘Carols for Choirs’ book, first published in 1961. Looking at materials from the OUP archive, we trace the journey from the initial idea through to its eventual release and unexpected success.
Mary Midgley muses that the dearth of men in Oxford during WW2 helped her and her friends Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch find their way into philosophy. But each of them took years to find her voice—Midgley longest of all. What held them back and what provoked them to finally speak up?
Both “thank” and “give” deserve our attention! And it is those two outwardly unexciting words that I’ll offer today as part of our etymological feast.
How does our body shape our experience of living in a city? In this OUPblog, Quill R Kukla focuses on one fascinating dimension along which bodies are included in or excluded from spaces, namely pace.
The effects of COVID-19 reach far beyond mortality, triggering widespread economic and sociopolitical consequences. It is unsurprising to learn, after everything that has transpired in the past two years, that COVID-19 has also had a detrimental effect on our mental health.
“Literature, we’re told, is the immortality of speech, but in fact reputations fade quickly.” In this OUPblog, read foundational figure in postcolonial theory, Homi K. Bhabha, in conversation with William Ghosh, author of V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought (Oxford 2020).
What might libraries do to help reduce the carbon footprint? We spoke to Martin O’Connor at University College Cork to find out how UCC Library chose to tackle the challenge and make their library greener.
The abstract of a research article has a simple remit: to faithfully summarize the reported research. After the title, it’s the most read section of the article. Crucially, it makes the case to the reader for reading the article in full. Alas, not all abstracts succeed.
The map highlights some fascinating examples of international law in action; examples across the globe examining how the law can, or cannot, be enforced across sovereign states.
Both “thank” and “give” deserve our attention! And it is those two outwardly unexciting words that I’ll offer today as part of our etymological feast.
To mark the 80th anniversary of the first transport to Theresienstadt on 24 November 1941, scholar Anna Hájková explores the social relations that formed within Nazi camps.
“The disc charts cannot stand many girls, no matter how gorgeous they look,” claimed Beatles manager Brian Epstein in A Cellarful of Noise, his memoir of the 1960s. He was explaining why he’d only ever represented one female performer—Cilla Black. His justification falls back on the then-conventional wisdom that girl singers were an anomaly, were each other’s competitors, and that there wasn’t an audience for their work.
The full story of prohibition—one you’ve probably never been told—is perhaps one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. Discover 20 key figures from history that you didn’t know were prohibitionists.