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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Just Talking

What is a conversation?  And why should conversations matter to poetry?    (1) ‘They found you out?’                                                            ...

Elizabeth K. Helsinger | 19 Aug 2022

Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China

If one visits Shanghai’s iconic waterfront known as the Bund (or Waitan in Chinese) today, one immediately notices the many historical buildings that line the western side of the Huangpu River. Remnants...

Ghassan Moazzin | 19 Aug 2022

A Revamped Archaeology of Blackness

The discipline of Classics stands at a curious crossroads. While some of its advocates resist conflating the ancient Greco-Roman world with the twenty-first century, others weaponize Greco-Roman antiquity...

Sarah F. Derbew | 12 Aug 2022

An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber: a new edition

Alexander Pope thought he was dullness incarnate; Henry Fielding accused him of murdering the English Language; Aaron Hill compared his acting to ‘the heavings of a disjointed caterpillar’. Even one...

David Roberts | 12 Aug 2022

Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers

Our everyday experience of the world reveals that the things around us are constantly changing.  As I look out my window, I notice that the grass outside has grown taller, the green raspberries have...

Gloria Frost | 10 Aug 2022

Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference: Rethinking Qualitative Research

What is Bayesian reasoning and how can we apply it to case studies and qualitative research? The basic idea is simple—we are social science “detectives,” and our goal is to find any and all...

Tasha Fairfield, Andrew E. Charman | 9 Aug 2022

Can Fracking Ease the Global Energy Crunch?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused a global energy crisis. The United States and the European Union have instituted partial embargos on Russian oil and gas, while Russia has responded by cutting off...

John Stolz, Daniel Bain, Michael Griffin | 9 Aug 2022

Ruling Children: Boy Kings in Medieval Europe

The succession of a child king was a relatively common occurrence across medieval Europe, but kingship is still usually studied from an adult-focused perspective which sees boy rulers as paradoxes or...

Emily Joan Ward | 8 Aug 2022

Democracy: ‘the line of truth and utility’

There is no doubt that liberal democracy as being currently practiced in the west, despite serious problems, is superior beyond comparison to many authoritarian or totalitarian autocracies. The latter...

Xiaobo Zhai, Philip Schofield | 5 Aug 2022

World Crime Fiction

At the end of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin, the prototype of the analytical detective, offers a disparaging verdict on the Parisian Prefect of Police....

Stewart King, Alistair Rolls, Jesper Gulddal | 4 Aug 2022

Will There Be a Thaw Period in China after Xi?

Perhaps the biggest challenge to dictatorships is the danger and uncertainty associated with a leadership transition. No one—including the ruler—knows the real rules of transition, such as how the...

Shaomin Li | 4 Aug 2022

Understanding Human Metabolism: Carbohydrates, the bread of life

‘Oh, I’ve cut out carbs.  I feel so much healthier’, many people tell me.  But I doubt they know what ‘carbs’ really are, nor why we really need them in our diet.  The word carbohydrate...

Keith Frayn | 1 Aug 2022