Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Steve Sheppard
In a recent post on Volokh Conspiracy, George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr writes that we have passed the “Golden Age of Treatises.” Considering an obituary of a law professor who had written a law treatise, Securities Regulation, Kerr observed how its author, Louis Loss, had been seen as giving shape and direction to a whole field of law.
To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we present a reading list of books and articles that look at all aspects of Holocaust scholarship, including remarkable stories those who risked their lives to save Jews, post-Holocaust Jewish theological responses, and the challenges of recording oral histories.
By Julia Hӧrnle
In the offline world the distribution of pornography has been strictly controlled. Age-verification and rating stems ensure that minors cannot access hardcore pornography. The British Board of Film Classification rates cinema and DVD content; content rated as R18 can only be shown in specialised cinemas with strict age-verification standards and certain pornographic content will not be rated for cinema or DVD distribution.
By Rebecca Clifford
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Britain is certainly not the only country that observes this commemorative day; since the turn of the twenty-first century, countries across Europe have made 27 January an official day of remembrance of the Holocaust, and even supra-national entities such as the UN have official obligations to hold commemorative ceremonies on this day.
By Tim Harris
Historians have been arguing over how far back to trace the origins of the civil war that broke out in England in 1642 ever since the war itself.
By Robert Crawford
For the first time since 1707 (more than half a century before Burns was born), the population of Scotland is being given the chance to vote in a referendum that asks the question, ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ The referendum won’t be held until 18 September, but already people are arguing about which side Robert Burns would have been on.
By Rebecca Lane
As an English graduate, publishing seemed a natural choice when I started my job hunt. However, I little thought I would one day be commissioning Oxford Companions and Oxford Paperback Reference books — two series that helped me immensely during my studies.
The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the HIV Medicine Association (hivma) are launching a new peer-reviewed, open access journal, Open Forum Infectious Diseases (OFID), providing a global forum for the rapid publication of clinical, translational, and basic research findings.
By Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg
Lifeline benefits for millions of jobless workers still hang in the balance. The current debate over whether to maintain benefits for long-term unemployment underscores limitations in unemployment insurance that have plagued this program throughout its history.
By Phil Ambery
It’s good to see the problem of anti-microbial resistance revisited by Professor Farrar — a timely reminder to us all of the potential dangers ahead. Memories are short, few will remember the days of the early 90s, when anti-HIV therapies were limited, as were the lives of patients with AIDS. Others will assume that the days of death by “consumption” have long since passed.
By Steven Beller
In the conclusion to Antisemitism VSI (2007) I saw antisemitism as an almost completely spent force. Events since then give one pause for thought. Israel appears no more accepted as a “good citizen” by much of the international community, and Jews continue to be attacked for their supposed support of the “Jewish state”.
By Stuart Casey-Maslen
More than 9,500 people were killed in Mexico in 2012 as a result of armed violence, primarily as the result of conflict between the Sinaloa cartel, the Las Zetas gang, and the state. Tens of thousands of Mexican troops and police were involved in these conflicts, and more than 400 were killed during the year.
Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in Alloway, a small village near the river Doon just south of the town of Ayr, in the south-west of Scotland. As Scots and Scotophiles to world over prepare to celebrate Burns Night tomorrow, here’s an excerpt from the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of his Selected Poems and Songs, dedicated to that river near which he grew up.
By Simon Eliot
Oxford University was a large mass-producer of books by the 1820s. Despite this, it was still occupying a very elegant but modest-sized neo-classical building in the centre of Oxford designed for it in 1713 by Nicholas Hawksmoor. By the mid-1820s this building was bursting at the seams.
By Anne Cunningham and Jamie Zibulsky
If you want to help a child get ahead in school and in life, there is no better value you can impart to him or her than a love of reading. The skills that early and avid reading builds are the skills that older readers need in order to make sense of sophisticated and complex texts.
By Jeremy Begbie
On my office wall I keep two photos together in a single frame. They show two teachers who inspired me more than any others—my first theology teacher, James Torrance (1923–2003), and next to him the American conductor, composer and pianist, Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990).