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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Pandemics Ancient and Modern

The village of Barrington, in Cambridgeshire, presents the viewer with a quintessentially English rural scene: with its thatched cottages and village pub, and one of the best-preserved and extensive village...

Peter Sarris | 18 May 2020

Power Sharing and the Coronavirus Pandemic

Power-sharing measures, rules that allocate decision-making rights among groups competing for access to state power, appear to be experiencing something of a renaissance. A conflict resolution tool that...

Caroline A. Hartzell | 18 May 2020

Disappearing Women: The Feminist Camouflage of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The First World War witnessed the birth of camouflage – both as a word and a developed military practice. But, while soldiers were disappearing into the landscape, the American feminist writer Charlotte...

Will Abberley | 18 May 2020

The loss of public space in a pandemic

When I’ve been on holiday in a foreign city, I’ve always enjoyed wandering around aimlessly in its public spaces, getting to know them in a wholly unsystematic and haphazard way, and even in Cambridge,...

Raymond Geuss | 18 May 2020

Everyday Emergencies

An emergency is defined not by the inherent badness or dangerousness of a situation, but by what we make of it. To call something an ‘emergency’ is to declare that something can and must be done about...

Lorna Finlayson | 18 May 2020

Worrying in Times of Plague

The revival of the London plague in 1665 ‘alarmed us all again,’ said Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): ‘and terrible apprehensions were among the people, especially the weather...

Francis O’Gorman | 18 May 2020

HIV and Coronavirus: Remembering Bruce Burnett and Li Wenliang

In November 1983 a twenty-nine-year-old man named Bruce Burnett returned to his homeland, New Zealand/Aotearoa, from San Francisco. Bruce hadn’t been in San Francisco long: he had left New Zealand...

Hugh Stevens | 15 May 2020

Joyce and Pandemics

In the last chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus misquotes a line from Thomas Nash’s “Litany in Time of Plague.” Nash wrote the poem during one of a...

Catherine Flynn | 15 May 2020

Deconstructing Parenthood: What makes a “Mother”?

Fifty years ago, before the development of artificial reproductive technology, and when same-sex relationships and transgender individuals were unrecognised by the law, the question of who was a child’s...

Claire Fenton-Glynn | 15 May 2020

Virus and Cultural Creativity

Corona virus has had a major impact on the functioning of our societies, health-care and economy. Many people have lost their lives or health, and even more have lost their jobs. The virus has severely...

Prof. Timo Maran | 15 May 2020

Virtues of Character in a Time of Corona: An Aristotelian Point of View

The most important virtues in our present situation are undoubtedly patience, self-restraint, and forbearance.  Yet none of them is contained in the catalogue of virtues in Aristotle’s ethics (see...

Dorothea Frede | 15 May 2020

Targets, Trust and COVID-19 Testing

Political scrutiny of the UK’s management of Covid-19 has recently revolved around an ambitious target the government set for itself: the goal of carrying out 100,000 tests per day by the end of April....

Christina Boswell | 15 May 2020