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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Approaching Nine Years of the Syrian War- Why Has International Law Been So Futile? from the editor of: The Syrian War: Between Justice and Political Reality (CUP, 2020)

The beginning of a new year did not stop the bloodshed in war torn Syria.  On January 1st, a rocket attack was launched by the Syrian government forces on a school-full of students and teachers- in Idlib,...

Hilly Moodrick-Even Khen, Nir T. Boms, Sareta Ashraph | 13 Jan 2020

What disasters tell us about the state’s relationship with its citizens

It has long been argued that the social contract between the state and its citizens is fractured in Pakistan, in fact some have even taken it further to say that citizenship is altogether missing and that...

10 Jan 2020

Crowd Behaviour in Financial Markets, from the Hong Kong Protests to Algorithmic Trading

In late 2019, Hong Kong erupted with unrest sparked by a deeply unpopular bill to allow the extradition of its citizens to mainland China. Since protests began in March, thousands of people have been arrested...

Christian Borch | 9 Jan 2020

The 1619 Project and Bringing History to the People

Weeping Time Author Anne C. Bailey weighs in on the debate over The 1619 Project.

Anne C. Bailey | 8 Jan 2020

Anne Finch and the “publick view”

Long before I decided to work on a scholarly edition of Anne Finch’s work, I was drawn to her distinctive voice. I first heard it as an undergraduate student in the 1980s, but in the least propitious...

Jennifer Keith | 8 Jan 2020

Critical Thinking: Why We Need It Now More than Ever

Fake news. Alternative Facts. Deep Fakes (videos and audios the make it appear that someone is saying something that person never said). An Army of Bots. Misinformation. Disinformation. Post truth. This...

Diane F. Halpern, Robert J. Sternberg | 8 Jan 2020

Photography, Shakespeare, and a princess in a pond

One afternoon at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1896, Louise Margaret, Duchess of Connaught, took this photograph of her niece, Helena Victoria, swimming on her back. The photograph...

Sally Barnden | 6 Jan 2020

Hotspots for future ‘Food wars’ identified

Rising tensions over scarcities of food, land and water combined with increasingly unstable climates threaten to unleash new wars and the mass flight of hundreds of millions of people by the mid-century. ‘Food...

Julian Cribb | 2 Jan 2020

Violence, past and present

In my recent Cambridge University Press book, A Renaissance of Violence, I document a frightening rise in civil violence in the Italian city of Bologna in the seventeenth century. I show how what began...

Colin Rose | 27 Dec 2019

Who’s Afraid of Religious Experience?

Whatever else religious experience is, it is experience, and it should be assessed accordingly. It is not a belief, a theory, or a creed. Instead, it is a kind of awareness that attracts one’s attention,...

Paul K. Moser | 20 Dec 2019

Literature, Spoken Language and Speaking Skills in Second Language Learning

What’s the big question you are trying to tackle and to what extent will Literature, Spoken Language and Speaking Skills lead to new avenues of enquiry? I am interested in how we can best understand...

Christian Jones | 20 Dec 2019

Cannibals: When England Became Imperial

Why put a Native American object on the cover of a book about Jacobean politics? The image that appears on the cover of The Making of an Imperial Polity is a headdress from Guiana (now Guyana), a region...

Lauren Working | 16 Dec 2019