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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Decolonizing the Literary Curriculum

The word curriculum is derived from the Latin verb “currere,” meaning run, trot, gallop, hasten, speed, travel, or rapidly flow. The concept of the curriculum is a unique, almost self-cancelling aggregate...

Ankhi Mukherjee, Ato Quayson | 3 Nov 2023

You can’t write that…8 myths about correct English

Picture a boxing ring, English on one side, diversity on the other, and you have a basic version of the history of written English in schools. English and diversity might otherwise be great friends, but...

Laura Aull | 2 Nov 2023

Emotion? We don’t talk about it!

Few would deny that emotions are fundamental to what it means to be human. Indeed, according to some, emotions are what make us human. Given that, and given the fact that humans communicate about their...

Louis de Saussure, Tim Wharton | 2 Nov 2023

Economic Immigrants and Refugees in Late Medieval England

In 1353, a fuller from Bruges, Walter Collessad appeared twice in the borough court of Great Yarmouth. On 25 March, he was sued for an unspecified debt by a weaver from Bruges, Peter van Skelle and then...

Milan Pajic | 1 Nov 2023

England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland

We say – and rightly – that we need to learn our histories. ‘Not knowing each other’s stories’, as David Olusoga has recently said in the Guardian, is a ‘weakness’ in Britain, not least...

Lorna Hutson | 31 Oct 2023

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Philosophy and Judaism

The question of the meaning of life is a modern question. This claim may elicit surprise. After all, didn’t ancient and medieval people, especially religious people, believe that they had answers to...

Alan L. Mittleman | 30 Oct 2023

What is democratic perfectionism?

American philosopher Stanley Cavell is read widely across the humanities and social sciences, yet his work has not received much uptake in the field of political philosophy. My new book Stanley...

Jonathan Havercroft | 30 Oct 2023

How Narrative Politics Shapes American Military Might

The end of the Cold War heralded a substantial ‘peace dividend’ during the 1990s, a series of large cuts in defense spending by the United States, the world’s sole remaining military superpower....

Alexandra Homolar | 27 Oct 2023

Performance, Modernity and the Plays

Why engage with a canonical playwright? Isn’t there enough work to do trying and recovering the works of playwrights who have all but been erased from the canon of Irish theatre history and whose plays...

Hélène Lecossois | 26 Oct 2023

Why Kathleen Stock is wrong to assume that ‘it’s not hate speech to say males can’t be women’

Kathleen Stock identifies as a philosopher of (expert on) sex and gender identity partly on the grounds that she has spent years (let us take her word for it) thinking, researching, and building careful...

Alexander Brown | 25 Oct 2023

Joseph Conrad on Russian Despotism

Although the scale and variety of Conrad’s authorship are colossal, no author is perhaps more closely linked to a single text than Conrad is to Heart of Darkness. Critics equate Conrad with its main...

Johan Adam Warodell | 25 Oct 2023

What Makes the Ten Commandments Meaningful?

Most books about the Ten Commandments ask the question: what did they really mean? My book, The Ten Commandments: Monuments of Memory, Belief, and Interpretation, asks instead how they mean. In other...

Timothy S. Hogue | 25 Oct 2023