Very Short Introductions
Series · 48
books · 1977-2024
Books in series
#477
Savannas
A Very Short Introduction
2016
Savannas form one of the largest and most important of the world's ecological zones. Covering one fifth of the Earth's land surface, they are home to some of the world's most iconic animals and form an extremely important global resource for plants and wildlife. However, increasing recognition of their land potential means that they are extremely vulnerable to accelerating pressures on usable land.
This Very Short Introduction considers savannas as landscapes. Discussing their origin, topography, and global distribution, Peter A. Furley explores the dynamic nature of savannas and illustrates how they have shaped human evolution and movements. He goes on to discuss the unrelenting pressures that confront conservation and management and considers the future for savannas.
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#537
Projects
A Very Short Introduction
2017
What is a project? How are projects organized to deal with a complex, rapidly changing, and uncertain world? Why are projects the organization of the future?
A project is a temporary organization and one-time process established to achieve a desired outcome. Projects range in size from small teams to large international joint-ventures and temporary coalitions of public and private organizations. What distinguishes projects from all other organizational activities—such as mass produced products and services—is that a project is finite in duration, lasting from hours, days, or weeks to years, and in some cases decades. Each project is disposable. It brings together people and resources to accomplish a goal and when the goal is accomplished, the organization disappears. When projects are complex, unpredictable, and changing, their plans have to be flexible and able to adjust to situations that cannot have been foreseen at the outset.
In this Very Short Introduction Andrew Davies looks at how projects have developed since the industrial revolution to create the human-built world in which we live, work, and play. Considering some of our greatest endeavours such as the Erie Canal, Apollo Moon landing, Japanese product development, and Chinese ecocity projects, Davies identifies how projects are organized and managed to design and produce large and complex systems, cope with fast changing conditions, and deal with the immense uncertainties required to create breakthrough innovations in products and services. He concludes by considering how projects could be organized to address the challenges facing the post-industrial society of the 21st century.
ABOUT THE SERIES : The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#611
Geoffrey Chaucer
A Very Short Introduction
2019
Originally writing over 600 years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer is today enjoying a global renaissance. Why do poets, translators, and audiences from so many cultures, from the mountains of Iran to the islands of Japan, find Chaucer so inspiring? In part this is down to the character and sheer inventiveness of Chaucer's work.
At the time Chaucer's writings were not just literary adventures, but also a means of convincing the world that poetry and science, tragedy and astrology, could all be explored through the English language. French was still England's aristocratic language of choice when Chaucer was born; Latin was used for university education, theological discussion, and for burying the dead. Could a hybrid tongue such as English ever generate great writing to compare with French and Latin? Chaucer, miraculously, believed that it could, through gradual expansion of expressiveness and scientific precision. He was never paid to do this; he was valued, rather, as a capable civil servant, regulating the export of wool and the building of seating for royal tournaments. Such experiences, however, fed his writing, leading him to achieve a range of social registers, from noble tragedy to barnyard farce, unrivalled for centuries. His tale-telling geography is vast, his fascination with varieties of religious belief endless, and his desire to voice female experience especially remarkable. Many Chaucerian poets and performers, today, are women. In this Very Short Introduction David Wallace introduces the life, performance, and poetry of Chaucer, and analyses his astonishing and enduring appeal.
Previously published in hardback as Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction
#657
American Military History
A Very Short Introduction
2020
Since the first English settlers landed at Jamestown with the legacy of centuries of European warfare in tow, the military has been an omnipresent part of America. In American Military A Very Short Introduction, Joseph T. Glatthaar explores this relationship from its origins in the thirteen colonies to today's ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.
During the Revolutionary War, tension grew between local militias and a standing army. The Founding Fathers attempted to strike a balance, enshrining an army, navy, and a "well-regulated Militia" in the Constitution. The US soon witnessed the rise of a professional military, a boon to its successes in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. However, after the Civil War, the US struggled to learn that the purpose of a peacetime army is to prepare for war.
When war did arrive, it arrived with a vengeance, gutting the trenches of the Great War with effective tanks, planes, machine guns, and poison gas. The US embraced the technology that would win both world wars and change the nature of battle in the Second World War. The US emerged from World War II as the most powerful nation in the war, but over the next several decades it was forced to confront the limits of its power. The nuclear era brought encounters defined by stalemate—from the Cold War conflicts of Korea and Vietnam to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 9/11, the US has been frustrated by unconventional warfare, including terrorism and cyberwar, largely negating the technological advantage it had held. Glatthaar examines all these challenges, looking to the future of the U.S. military and its often proud and complicated legacy.
#667
Arbitration
A Very Short Introduction
2021
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
Arbitration is a legal dispute resolution mechanism, alternative to courts. It provides binding decisions, enforceable around the world. It is where parties take their disputes when they have agreed that courts, for one reason or another, do not suit them - which happens more often than one might think. Some of the most politically sensitive disputes on the largest scale go to arbitration. Countries which need to settle their boundaries in areas of the oceans rich in oil, gas and other resources sometimes arbitrate, and much of the war in Sudan was eventually tied up with an arbitration. Investors who have staked billions of dollars in unstable developing countries rely on arbitration clauses to protect their investments. But also much smaller, everyday cases are routinely dealt with by arbitration - millions of consumers, whether they know it or not, enter into arbitration contracts when they conclude routine transactions. Even athletes get involved in arbitration cases of great
notoriety, for instance when these relate to doping offences during the Olympic Games.
This Very Short Introduction explains what arbitration is, how it works, what parties who have agreed to go to arbitration should expect, the relationship between arbitration and the law, and the politics of arbitration. It also considers where the global system of arbitration is headed.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#698
Elizabeth Bishop
A Very Short Introduction
2022
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
Elizabeth Bishop has been described as the 'best-loved' poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction explores the 90 or so published poems that are at the core of her remarkable canon of verse. Drawing on biographical and critical material, Jonathan Post also makes frequent use of Bishop's letters and commentary by fellow poets, including Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and James Merrill to illuminate her writing and contemporary landscape.
Throughout, Post places Bishop's lyric poetry alongside her other poetic genres, short stories, and translations within the context of her life and aeasthetic values, showing how these shaped her work. Ranging across her poems, the book covers a wide range of core themes, including Bishop's powerful use of description, the environment, balance, and ideas of love and loss, as well as looking at Bishop's interest in the visual arts.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#699
Human Resource Management
A Very Short Introduction
2022
The way in which organizations manage their people has always been pivotal to their performance, long before formal human resource management coalesced into a definable and somewhat fashionable discipline in the mid-1980s. Earlier campaigns for worker welfare in the 18th and 19th century were driven by a mix of humanitarian, religious, philanthropic, and business motives, and sought workplace amenities such as medical care, housing, and libraries. At the same time functionaries and departments specialising in HR processes such as hiring, payroll, and record keeping emerged.
This Very Short Introduction describes how the key players and watershed moments in labour history shaped the state of human resource management today. In our era of globalization human resource management has to contend with a number of new and increasingly complex factors, such as global sourcing, regional trade agreements and labour standards, remote working, strategic alliances, and innovation driven by competition. As traditional sources of competitive advantage such as access to capital, protected markets, or proprietary technologies evaporate, firms increasingly look to human resource management to offer a competitive edge. In the 'laboratory' of university departments or in the gritty and sweaty reality of the shop floor, there is no single model of human resource management. Instead human resource management today is as able to impact everything from small owner-managed shops in Brick Lane to the high tech behemoths of Silicon Valley. Adrian Wilkinson shows how human resource
management covers the relations between employees and their employers, and explores the range of HR practices, processes, and line management activities.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#702
Employment Law
A Very Short Introduction
2022
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
In today's society, work takes up a vast proportion of the time and energy of ordinary people. Although use of the phrase 'work-life balance' is now commonplace in the media and ordinary conversation, people work longer hours than ever before. However, rather than purely a means to an end in terms of supporting oneself financially, the workplace is a place to develop skills and talents and build lasting friendships. For these reasons, people want to know about their rights in the workplace.
Issues of equal pay, discrimination, discharge/dismissal, and redundancy are prevalent within the media, and there is a growing public appetite for knowledge of the law governing the employment relationship.
This Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the main kinds of employment rights and labour laws found in many countries. It unpicks and evaluates some of the assumptions underpinning contemporary attitudes to such rights and laws in order to measure whether they are warranted. Throughout it also considers the economic, political, sociological, and social justifications for employment rights and laws.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#711
Negotiation
A Very Short Introduction
2022
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
Everyone negotiates. Whenever any person, company, or country needs someone else to accomplish something, they must negotiate. Negotiation is essential for peace and international relations, but also for economically efficient trades and bargains in business, and for problem solving skills in workplaces, families, and interpersonal interactions.
This Very Short Introduction provides a comprehensive and accessible review of both conceptual and behavioural approaches to the human process of negotiation. Carrie Menkel-Meadow draws on research in constituent fields of human psychology, diplomacy, law, business, anthropology, game theory, decision making, international relations, sociology, public policy, and economics, suggesting models for creative problem solving to often intractable problems. Considering that most people are tense and frightened of what they perceive to be scarce resource confrontations with opponents and competitors, Menkel-Meadow offers different ways to plan for and approach others to solve human problems and seek solutions that satisfy both parties. Alongside this, Menkel-Meadow summarises recent research on the variations of human behaviour, providing vivid examples from history and current affairs to solve some of the most difficult problems.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#712
Evil
A Very Short Introduction
2022
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
We regularly encounter appalling wrongdoing, with the media offering a depressing parade of violent assault, rape, and murder. Yet sometimes even the cynical and world-weary amongst us are taken aback. Sometimes we confront a crime so terrible, so horrendous, so deeply wrong, that we reach for the
word 'evil'. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were not merely wrong, but evil. A serial killer who tortures his victims is not merely a bad person. He is evil. And as the Holocaust showed us, we must remain vigilant against the threat of evil. But what exactly is evil? If we use the word 'evil', are we
buying into a naive Manichean worldview, in which two cosmic forces of good and evil are pitted against one another? Are we guilty of demonizing our enemies? How does 'evil' go beyond what is merely bad or wrong?
This Very Short Introduction explores the answers that philosophers have offered to these questions. Luke Russell discusses why some philosophers think that evil is a myth or a fantasy, while others think that evil is real, and is a concept which plays an important role in contemporary secular
morality. Along the way he asks whether evil is always horrific and incomprehensible, or if it can be banal. Considering if there is a special psychological hallmark that sets the evildoers apart from the rest of us, Russell also engages with ongoing discussions over psychopathy and empathy,
analysing the psychology behind evildoing.
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and
enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#713
The American Judicial System
A Very Short Introduction
2022
At some point, everyone living in the United States has some type of interaction with the American judicial system. For most, this contact is relatively contesting a traffic ticket, suing or being sued in civil court, being a witness in a civil or criminal trial, or serving on a jury. Others are caught up in the criminal justice system - as defendants, as victims, as witnesses, as jurors, or as relatives of a victim or a defendant. For still others, contact comes via an important policy issue affecting their lives in the hands of judges and justices sitting in judgment in marble temples to the law. Yet whatever the level of contact, the American judicial system affects peoples' lives. What courts and judges do matters.
This book provides a very short, but complete introduction to the institutions and people, the rules and processes, that make up the American judicial system. Jargon free and aimed at a general reader, this Very Short Introduction explains the 'where,' 'when,' and 'who' of American courts. It also makes clear the 'how' and 'why' behind the law as it affects everyday people. It is, in a word, a starting place to understanding the third branch of American government at both the state and federal levels; a guide to those wishing to know the basics of the American judicial system; and a cogent synthesis of how the various elements that make up the law and legal institutions fit together.
#714
The History of Computing
A Very Short Introduction
2022
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
This lively Very Short Introduction reviews the central events, machines, and people that feature in established accounts of the history of computing, critically examining received perceptions and providing a fresh look at the nature and development of the modern electronic computer.
The book begins by discussing a widely accepted linear narrative of the history of computing, centred around innovatory highlights that start with the use of knotted cords to aid calculation, all the way to the smartphones of the present day. It discusses the problems and simplifications present in such a narrative, and offers instead an account, centred on users, that identifies four distinct historical calculation, automatic computing, information management, and communication. These threads are examined individually, tracing their paths and the convergences of related technologies into what has come to be called 'the information age'.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#715
Ivan Pavlov
A Very Short Introduction
2022
In this book, Daniel P. Todes provides concise introduction to the life and science of the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936). Todes weaves together Pavlov's life, values, context, and science by focusing upon his quest to understand the psyche and the "torments of our consciousness".
This introduction follows the origins and maturation of Pavlov's quest from his early life in a priestly family in provincial Riazan, to his struggles and late professional success in the glittering capital of St. Petersburg, through the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917-1921, to the rebuilding of his life in his 70s as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and his success and personal torments in 1929-1936 during the industrialization, cultural revolution, and terror of Stalin times.
Beyond a basic biography, Todes devotes particular attention to Pavlov's Nobel Prize-winning research on digestion (1891-1903) and his iconic studies of conditional reflexes and higher nervous activity (1903-1936), as well as his experiments with dogs. Fundamentally reinterpreting Pavlov's famous research on conditional reflexes, Todes shows that Pavlov was not a behaviorist, did not use a bell, and was uninterested in training dogs. The Russian scientist sought to explain not merely external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. Furthermore, this iconic "objectivist" was a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences and values. Exploring the two unpublished manuscripts upon which Pavlov was working when he died, Todes shows the importance of his little-known experiments on chimps and explores his final thoughts about the relationship of science, Christianity, and Bolshevism.
#716
World Mythology
A Very Short Introduction
1977
The mythologies of the world are collective cultural dreams, and as such should be analyzed first from cultural perspectives. How do myths of the ancient Egyptians or Greeks, for instance, reflect the realities of the Egyptian and Greek cultures? When compared, however, mythologies reveal certain universal themes or motifs that point to larger trans-cultural issues such as the place of the human species in creation or the nature of deity as a concept.
World Mythology: A Very Short Introduction is organized around the universal motifs. Creation, the Flood, the Hero Quest, the Trickster/Culture Hero, the Pantheons, the High God, the Great Goddess. Veteran mythology scholar David Leeming examines examples of each motif from a variety of cultures—Greek, Egyptian, Norse, American Indian, African, Polynesian, Jewish, Christian, Hindu—treating them as reflections of the cultures that "dreamed" them. He compares and analyzes them, exposing their universal significance and creating a "world mythology."
#719
Microbiomes
A Very Short Introduction
2022
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
The term 'microbiomes' encapsulates an important scientific breakthrough of recent years. This is the realization that humans, other animals, and plants harbour communities of microorganisms which are mostly beneficial but can occasionally cause or exacerbate disease. Our quickly developing understanding of microbiomes is being translated into novel microbial therapies for human disease and is contributing to sustainable practices in agriculture and food production. On the flipside, there is a growing concern that some claims for microbiomes, especially in relation to human health, far exceed the scientific data.
This Very Short Introduction is an essential guide to the fast-moving discipline of microbiome science. It accessibly distills the key facts about our resident microbiomes, explains how and why our health and wellbeing depend on them, and provides readers with the fundamental knowledge they need to judge the reliability of claims about microbiome-based applications.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#720
British Cinema
A Very Short Introduction
2022
Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial - often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers.
In this Very Short Introduction, Charles Barr considers films and filmmakers, and studios and sponsorship, against the wider view of changing artistic, socio-political, and industrial climates over the decades of the 20th Century. Considering British cinema in the wake of one of the most familiar of cinematic reference points - Alfred Hitchcock - Barr traces how British cinema has developed its own unique path, and has since been celebrated for its innovative approaches and distinctive artistic language.
ABOUT THE
The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#722
Condensed Matter Physics
A Very Short Introduction
2023
There are many more states of matter than just solid, liquid, and gas. Examples include liquid crystal, magnet, glass, and superconductor. New states are continually, and unexpectedly, being discovered. Some states, such as superconductor, can act like Schrödinger's cat and exhibit the weirdness normally associated with the quantum theory of atoms, photons, and electrons. Condensed matter physics seeks to understand how states of matter and their distinct physical properties emerge from the atoms of which a material is composed.
A system of many interacting parts can have properties that the parts do not have. Water is wet, but a single water molecule is not. Your brain is conscious, but a single neuron is not. Such emergent phenomena are central to condensed matter physics and also occur in many fields, from biology to computer science to sociology, leading to rich intellectual connections. When do quantitative differences become qualitative differences? Can simple models describe rich and complex behaviour? What is the relationship between the particular and the universal? How is the abstract related to the concrete? Condensed matter physics is all about these big questions.
The materials in silicon chips, liquid crystal displays, and magnetic computer memories, may have transformed society, but understanding them has transformed how we think about complex systems.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#723
Nanotechnology
A Very Short Introduction
2022
What is Nanotechnology and how will it affect us? Nanobots, nanoprobes, nanoswarms, nanogenes the list goes on. Nanotechnology is a staple of science fiction and has a rather chequered history when it comes to public perception: will swarms of sentient nanomachines ultimately take over the
world or will nanotech give us nothing more than improved sun creams? As this Very Short Introduction shows, the science underpinning nanotechnology is equally as fascinating as the best nano-inspired sci-fi.
In this book, Philip Moriarty introduces the key scientific themes and concepts underpinning the field, including interatomic and intermolecular forces, single atom imaging, quantum confinement, self-assembly, molecular machinery, and nanomagnetism. Moriarty includes results from ground-breaking
scientific studies, such as scanning probe microscope images of atomic and molecular "landscapes", providing visceral and intuitive insights into the nanoscopic world.
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and
enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#725
Vatican II
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), or Vatican II, is arguably the most significant event in the life of the Catholic Church since the Reformation. The Council initiated, intentionally or not, profound changes not simply within Catholic theology, but in the religious, social, and moral lives of the world's billion Catholics. It also reconfigured, intellectually and practically, the Church's engagements with those outside of it - most obviously with regard to other religions.
The sixteen documents formally issued by Vatican II constitute some of the most influential writings of the whole twentieth century. Debates over their correct interpretation and authority are constant, but they remain an indispensable point-of-reference for all areas of Catholic life, from liturgy and sacraments, to the Church's vast network of charitable and educational endeavours the world over.
In this Very Short Introduction, Shaun Blanchard and Stephen Bullivant present the backstory to this event. Vatican II is explored in light of the wider history of the Catholic Church and placed in the tumultuous context of the 1960s. It distils the research on Vatican II, employing the first-hand accounts of participants and observers, and the official proceedings of the Council to paint a rich picture of one of the most important events of the last century.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#726
Suburbs
A Very Short Introduction
2023
We live in the suburban era. Well over half of all Americans and two-thirds of Canadians live in suburbs. Tracts of suburban bungalows ring Sydney and Melbourne. Suburban apartments rise on the outskirts of Paris, Prague, Singapore, and Beijing. Nearly everyone has a strong opinion about suburbs. Folks who love dense cities scorn "suburbia," while people who like big yards dislike bustling sidewalks and subways. Social scientists argue whether contemporary suburbs are losing their luster or if a supposed back-to-the-city trend is a mirage—a debate that has been exacerbated by uncertainty over the effects of COVID-19.
A Very Short Introduction tackles two central What is the history behind a suburbanizing world? What does the suburban trend mean for society, politics, and culture? Two chapters describe the ways that the new technologies of streetcars, trains, automobiles, and internet have allowed the compact cities of Britain and the United States to grow into sprawling metropolitan regions. The following chapters explore the vertical suburbs of Europe and East Asia, improvised or do-it-yourself suburbs in both North America Latin America, and suburbs as places of employment. The book concludes by exploring criticism and praise of suburbs in popular sociology, fiction, film, and the Americanization of twenty-first century suburbs around the globe. The approach is rooted in history and geography, draws on all the social sciences, and highlights the ways in which suburbs are central to the ways that we understand the present and imagine the future.
#727
The Jury
A Very Short Introduction
2023
From ancient Athens to modern Asia, cultures have wanted ordinary people involved in making legal decisions. This Very Short Introduction charts juries from antiquity through the English-speaking world and beyond to Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Today, juries have become a symbol of democracy and popular legitimacy.
But in English-speaking countries, jury trials are declining. Civil juries have been virtually abolished everywhere except the United States, and plea bargaining is taking the place of criminal jury trials. In this book, Renée Lettow Lerner describes the benefits and challenges of using juries, including jury nullification. She considers how innovations from non-English-speaking countries may be key to the survival of citizen participation in the legal system.
Along the way, the book tells how a small German state invented a way of using jurors that is now found around the world. And it reveals why some defendants preferred to be crushed to death by weights rather than convicted by a jury.
#730
The Civil Rights Movement
A Very Short Introduction
2023
The Civil Rights Movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging recognition of its immense import, more often than not the movement has been misrepresented and misunderstood. For many, a singular moment, frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial, sums up much of what Americans and the world know about that remarkable decade of struggle.
In The Civil Rights Movement: A Very Short Introduction, Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of "movement" back into our image and understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.
#731
Ancient Greek and Roman Science
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
Ancient Greece is often considered to be the birthplace of science and medicine, and the explanation of natural phenomena without recourse to supernatural causes. The early natural philosophers - lovers of wisdom concerning nature - sought to explain the order and composition of the world, and how we come to know it. They were particularly interested in what exists and how it is ontology and cosmology. They were also concerned with how we come to know (epistemology) and how best to live (ethics). At the same time, the scientific thinkers of early Greece and Rome were also influenced by ideas from other parts of the world, and incorporated aspects of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Indian science and mathematics in their studies.
In this Very Short Introduction Liba Taub gives an overview of the major developments in early science between the 8th century BCE and 6th century CE. Focussing on Greece and Rome, Taub challenges a number of modern misconceptions about science in the classical world, which has often been viewed with a modern lens and by modern scientists, such as the misconception that little empirical work was conducted, or that the Romans did not 'do' science, unlike the Greeks. Beginning with the scientific notions of Thales, Pythagoras, Parmenides and other Presocratics, she moves on to Plato and Aristotle, before considering Hellenistic science, the influence of the Stoics and Epicurean ideas, and the works of Pliny the Elder, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy. In her sweeping discussion, Taub explores the richness and creativity of ideas concerning the natural world, and the influence these ideas have had on later centuries.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#732
Pseudoscience
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella - astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields “pseudo” is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements - both of which display allegations of “pseudoscience” on all sides - there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.
A Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?
Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. A Very Short Introduction provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.
#733
Bohemians
A Very Short Introduction
2023
The Romantic myth of Bohemia originated in the early nineteenth century as a way of describing the new conditions faced by artists and writers when the previous system of aristocratic patronage collapsed in the wake of the Age of Revolution. Without the patron system, the artist was free to move around, to seek an audience wherever fortune beckoned. This marketing model likening the artist's vagabond career to the "gypsy" life helps to explain part of the bohemian myth, but not all of it. Most bohemians have scant interest in commercial gain and are not so itinerant after all, confining their movements to down-market urban neighbourhoods where the rent is cheap and the morals are loose.
This Very Short Introduction traces the myth of Bohemia through its various fictional manifestations, from Henry Murger's novel Scenes of Bohemian Life (1851) and Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème (1896) to Aki Kaurismäki's film La vie de Bohème (1992), and Jonathan Larson's musical Rent (1996). It goes on to examine the history of different bohemian communities, including those in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the Schwabing section of Munich, and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. David Weir also considers the politics of Bohemia and traces the careers of the artists Gustave Courbet and Pablo Picasso and the great chanteuses Yvette Guilbert, Fréhel, and Edith Piaf in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, where a rich tradition of popular culture indebted to Bohemia also developed. Weir concludes with a discussion of the legacy of Bohemia today as something outworn and dying, an exhausted tradition that somehow continues.
#734
Mathematical Analysis
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Brilliant, sharp, inspiring
The 17th-century calculus of Newton and Leibniz was built on shaky foundations, and it wasn't until the 18th and 19th centuries that mathematicians—especially Bolzano, Cauchy, and Weierstrass—began to establish a rigorous basis for the subject. The resulting discipline is now known to mathematicians as analysis.
This book, aimed at readers with some grounding in mathematics, describes the nascent evolution of mathematical analysis, its development as a subject in its own right, and its wide-ranging applications in mathematics and science, modelling reality from acoustics to fluid dynamics, from biological systems to quantum theory.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#735
The History of Emotions
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
Emotions are complex mental states that resist reduction. They are visceral reactions but also beliefs about the world. They are spontaneous outbursts but also culturally learned performances. They are intimate and private and yet gain their substance and significance only from interpersonal and social frameworks. And just as our emotions in any given moment display this complex structure, so their history is plural rather than singular. The history of emotions is where the history of ideas
meets the history of the body, and where the history of subjectivity meets social and cultural history.
In this Very Short Introduction, Thomas Dixon traces the historical ancestries of feelings ranging from sorrow, melancholy, rage, and terror to cheerfulness, enthusiasm, sympathy, and love. The picture that emerges is a complex one, showing how the states we group together today as "the emotions" are the product of long and varied historical changes in language, culture, beliefs, and ways of life. The grief-stricken rage of Achilles in the Iliad, the happiness inscribed in
America's Declaration of Independence, the love of humanity that fired crusades and revolutions through the ages, and the righteous rage of modern protest movements all look different when seen through this lens.
With examples from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, including forgotten feelings and the creation of modern emotional regimes, this Very Short Introduction sheds new light on our emotions in the present, by looking at what historians can tell us about their past. Dixon explains the key ideas of historians of emotions as they have developed in conversation with psychology and psychiatry, with attention paid especially to ideas about basic emotions, psychological construction, and
affect theory.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#736
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
This book provides an introduction to the most important philosopher of the Islamic world, Ibn Sīnā, often known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna. After introducing the man and his works, with an overview of the historical context in which he lived, the book devotes chapters to the different areas of Ibn Sīnā's thought. Among the topics covered are his innovations in logic, his theory of the human soul and its powers, the relation between his medical writings and his philosophy, and his metaphysics of existence. Particular attention is given to two famous his flying man thought experiment and the so-called “demonstration of the truthful,” a proof for the existence of God as the Necessary Existent. A distinctive feature of the book is its attention to the relationship between Ibn Sīnā and Islamic rational theology ( kalām ): in which we see how Ibn Sīnā responded to this tradition in many areas of his thought. A final chapter looks at Ibn Sīnā's legacy i
Islamic world and in Latin Christendom. Here Adamson focuses on the critical responses to Ibn Sīnā in subsequent generations by such figures as al-Ghazālī, al-Suhrawardī, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#737
Invasive Species
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Today there is no place on Earth that does not harbour invasive exotic species. Invasive plants and animals can be found on every continent, including Antarctica, and within all waterbodies, including all oceans. In our increasingly connected world, with speedy commercial and recreational travel and the global movement of biological matter for food, invasive species are showing up at such a fast rate that there is no way to accurately count how many currently exist or how many are likely to emerge in the coming decades. Monitoring these species and controlling their spread is essential, as we increasingly understand the negative impacts they their threat to our health; the toll they take on our commercial production; and the threat they pose to native ecosystems.
This Very Short Introduction provides a clear definition of an invasive species, and considers the myriad ways they are moved around the globe, and the ecological, social, and economic impacts they often impose. Exploring the way Earth's biodiversity is being affected by global change, Julie Lockwood also discusses policy and management approaches to combating the ill-effects of invasive species, and how invasive species fit within the broader context of environmental change.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#738
Biodiversity Conservation
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
Extinction is a natural process. In geological time there have been several periods of mass extinction. One of these periods is unfolding right now but all the evidence suggests that current extinction rates are between a hundred and a thousand times greater than the background rate. To put this in to context, a quarter of all known mammalian species is at risk. The current extinction crisis is unique, because it is caused by the impact of one species, humans, on all others. This acceleration of species loss, and the much more widespread reductions in the populations of many species, is not merely a tragedy in aesthetics, it is also a threat to the quality of human life, indeed to the entire human enterprise.
Biodiversity, the diversity of life, is not only fascinating and beautiful, it is the engine of all the world's natural cycles, and the source of many of the resources on which humanity depends. Concern about biodiversity conservation is, therefore, not merely the preoccupation of a few enthusiastic naturalists - it is the lifeline business of everybody.
In this Very Short Introduction, David Macdonald introduces the concept of biodiversity and the basic biological processes that it involves - evolutionary, ecological, and behavioral. He considers the various threats to biodiversity, their impacts, and some of the solutions to the problems; concluding by considering the future of biodiversity conservation.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#739
The Victorians
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
The Victorian period may have come to an end over 120 years ago, but the Victorians continue to be a vital presence in the modern world. Contemporary Britain is still in large part Victorian in its transport networks, sewage systems, streets, and houses. Victorian cultural legacies, especially in art, science, and literature, are still celebrated. The first to have to grapple with many of the challenges of modern urban society, we continue to look to the Victorians for inspiration and solace. And we are increasingly aware of the ways their global actions shaped, often for ill, the world around us. Much mythologised, inexhaustibly controversial, the Victorians are an inescapable reference point for understanding the modern histories not just of Britain and its empire, but of the world.
In The A Very Short Introduction Martin Hewitt offers a guide through the thickets of judgement and debate which have grown around the period and its people, to offer a historical overview of the Victorians and their legacies. He seeks to answer five crucial questions. Why have the Victorians continued occupy such a prominent place in the cultures of not just the anglophone world? How far does it make sense to think of a 64-year period arbitrarily given an identity by the longevity of the Queen as an identifiable historical period in a general sense? How justified are the value-laden versions of the Victorians which argue for the existence of a particular world view called 'Victorianism'? Beyond ideology, what was Victorian Britain actually like DS and in particular, what was distinctive about it? Who were the Victorians DS not just the eminent few, but the population as a whole? And finally, how far and with what results did the Victorians and their culture spread across
the globe?
In answering these questions, Hewitt cautions against some long-held orthodoxies, throws a light on some less well-known aspects of the period, and urges the importance of understanding the Victorians on their own terms if we are to effectively engage with their legacies.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#740
Horace
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
Horace was one of the greatest poets during the reign of Augustus and is seen as mark of cultural sophistication since this time. This Very Short Introduction examines how Horace's poetry has exerted enormous influence but argues that it is best understood within the traditions of ancient literature.
Llewellyn Morgan guides the reader through the dizzying vagaries of Horace's biography, which reflects the political and social instability of the period. His poetry, and the life he artfully constructs and presents to us in it, engages both with the greatest crisis that Rome had ever faced, and its resolution by the first Emperor. Horace is Rome's laureate, and through him we experience the anxieties and triumphs of his age. For posterity, Horace has served for a model of the good life, a promoter of enlightened retirement, but has also exemplified poetic artistry, and is the most creative manipulator of the Latin language, even among his remarkable contemporaries.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#741
Imagination
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world. Long regarded by philosophers as an elusive and mysterious capacity of the human mind, imagination has been the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, described as both dangerous and divine, as merely peripheral to rationality and as essential to all thinking. Drawing on philosophy, aesthetics, literary and cognitive theory as well as the human sciences, this book engages the dramatic conceptual history of imagination together with contemporary explanations of its role in cognition to
explain its importance in everyday life as well as the exquisite creativity of the arts, scientific discovery, and invention. Engaging examples from cave paintings to modern painting, performance art to pop art, physics to phenomenology, technological inventions to literary worlds, the Nazca geoglyphs to dramatic theatre, poetry, and jazz improvisation, the author illuminates with clarity and vision the philosophy of imagination and the stakes of its involvement in human thinking.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#742
French Cinema
A Very Short Introduction
2023
It is often claimed that the French invented cinema. Dominating the production and distribution of cinema until World War 1, when they were supplanted by Hollywood, the French cinema industry encompassed all genres, from popular entertainment to avant-garde practice. The French invented the “auteur” and the “cine-club” ; they incubated criticism from the 1920s to our own day that is unrivalled; and they boast more film journals, fan magazines, TV shows, and festivals devoted to film than anywhere else.
This Very Short Introduction opens up French cinema through focusing on some of its most notable works, using the lens of the New Wave decade (1958-1968) that changed cinema worldwide. Exploring the entire French cinematic oeuvre, Dudley Andrew teases out distinguishing themes, tendencies, and lineages, to bring what is most crucial about French Cinema into alignment. He discusses how style has shaped the look of female stars and film form alike, analysing the “made up” aesthetic of many films, and the paradoxical penchant for French cinema to cruelly unmask surface beauty in quests for authenticity. Discussing how French cinema as a whole pits strong-willed characters against auteurs with high-minded ideas of film art, funded by French cinema's close rapport to literature, painting, and music, Dudley considers how the New Wave emerged from these struggles, becoming an emblem of ambition for cinema that persists today. He goes on to show how the values promulgated by the New Wave
directors brought the three decades that preceded it into focus, and explores the deep resonance of those values today, fifty years later.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#744
Simone Weil
A Very Short Introduction
2024
This Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the intriguing and provocative life and ideas of twentieth century French philosopher, mystic, and social activist Simone Weil. Weil was not a typical, systematic philosopher. Despite her short life, Weil's philosophy has much to offer us in our times of personal, communal, political, and environmental crises, both in the breath and poignancy of her philosophy, and the topics it covers.
In keeping with Weil's spirit to consider and address laypeople, Rozelle-Stone takes readers, including those who have had little or no previous exposure to Weil or philosophy, on an accessible journey of Weil's major philosophical impacts. This exploration consists of seven chapters her life and manner of death, both characterized by attention; the influence of ancient Greek ideas on her philosophy; her thoughts on labour and politics; her unique and ecumenical religious inspirations, stemming from Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism; her ethical philosophy centred on a specific notion of attentiveness; her understanding of beauty as connected to fragility but also eternity; and finally, her legacy and influence on contemporary writers and issues, particularly as she may help us navigate and critically assess the growing convergence between religious fervour, late capitalist and corporate values, and authoritarian politics.
ABOUT THE
The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#745
The Gulag
A Very Short Introduction
2024
A vast system of prisons, camps, and exile settlements, the Gulag was one of the defining attributes of the Stalinist Soviet Union and one of the most heinous examples of mass incarceration in the twentieth century, combining the functions of a standard prison system with the goal of isolating and punishing alleged enemies of the Soviet regime. it stretched throughout the Soviet Union, from central Moscow to the farthest reaches of Siberia. From its creation in 1930 to its partial dismantling in the mid-1950s, approximately 25 million people passed through the Gulag. Prisoners and exiles were forced to work in brutal conditions, and millions perished. Although the majority of prisoners and exiles were released after Stalin's death, this was not an end to their struggles. Survivors attempted to reintegrate themselves into a Soviet political, social, and economic system that was hardly welcoming. Although some former prisoners wrote or spoke about their experiences in the years and
decades after release, it was not until after the collapse of the Soviet Union that a full reckoning became possible.
The A Very Short Introduction examines the Gulag and its legacy based on prisoner testimony, archival sources, and the very latest scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. It answers pressing questions such what was the Gulag, and why was it created? How did it fit into the Soviet social, cultural, and economic system? What did prisoners and exiles, who came from a wide range of backgrounds, experience in the Gulag? What were their prospects for survival? How did former prisoners and exiles attempt to come to terms with their experiences after release?
This Very Short Introduction focuses on three themes—the close social, cultural, political, and economic connections between the world of the Gulag and the Soviet Union at large; the diverse identities of prisoners and exiles and how this affected their experiences; and the long-term legacies of the Gulag in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet successor states. Ultimately, The A Very Short Introduction treats the Gulag as one of the quintessential institutions of the Stalinist Soviet Union and an example of how modern states, particularly those with utopian ambitions, have sought to manage populations through incarceration and forced labor.
#746
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Very Short Introduction
2024
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
Fyodor Dostoevsky became the writer best known for his treatment of the big questions of ethics, religion, and philosophy.
In this Very Short Introduction, Deborah Martinsen explores Dostoevsky's tumultuous life his political imprisonment and narrow escape from execution, his Siberian exile, his gambling addiction, his romantic marriage, and his literary success. Martinsen also delves into his major works - Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, The Diary of a Writer, and more. Each chapter analyzes a key theme or aspect of Dostoevsky's writing that showcases his profound insights into human nature and doubling, freedom, shame, social justice, scandal, aesthetics, ethics, faith, and the eternal questions. Martinsen also demonstrates how Dostoevsky's novels remain relevant today as they address pressing questions about freedom, morality, and meaning in a complex world.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#747
The Self
A Very Short Introduction
2024
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
'Know thyself' is said to have been one of the maxims carved into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. On the face of it, this does not seem like a very difficult task. My self is with me at every moment of every day, I have access to its inner thoughts and feelings, and I am hardly liable to mistake someone else for me. At the same time, however, the self is surprisingly elusive and opaque. What, after all, is a self? Is it some kind of object? If so, what kind? If not an object, what then? Is our sense of self ultimately illusory? Something that disappears when studied too closely? Our understanding of the self is replete with puzzles and I cannot be anyone but who I am, and yet everyone will acknowledge that there are circumstances in which being oneself is an extremely difficult task. If I change enough, I can be said to have become a different person. I cannot get away from myself, and yet I can find and lose myself.
In this Very Short Introduction, Marya Schechtman uses insights from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and popular thought to consider some of the most compelling and puzzling questions about the self, including questions about what kind of object a self is if it is an object at all, what it means to be oneself and why it is important, what kinds of changes the self can and cannot survive, whether a self can be separated from its body, whether more than one self can exist in a single body, and what role engagement with the environment and with other selves plays in constituting and maintaining the self. These investigations yield a complex, multi-dimensional picture of the self as a subject and agent embedded in and interacting with a natural and social world.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#748
British Architecture
A Very Short Introduction
2024
Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring
British A Very Short Introduction presents an original and engaging overview of the architecture of the British Isles, from medieval times to the present day. Avoiding the traditional approach of a chronological survey of architects and architectural style, each chapter presents a thematic exploration of key aspects of British architecture that endure across time and still have relevance today. Arnold uses illustrated chapters to aid appreciation of the artistic and cultural significance of British architecture and how it operates as a barometer of social trends. Arnold also highlights the ways in which architecture can project national and regional identities.
British architecture tells of the intrinsic nature of Britishness and is an important means of understanding Britain's connection with the rest of the world. There is no doubt about the international significance of the work of recent and contemporary British architects. But Arnold also relates how a preoccupation with the past has been a constant theme in design thinking and practice. A thematic, historical understanding of British architecture in terms of its form and purpose explains much about the society and culture for which it was built. Architecture continues to shape patterns of living and social interaction and responds to new demands. Equally, debates about how best to express the nation through its architecture reveal much about Britain's perception of itself and how this is expressed at home and abroad. Finally, Arnold explores how subsequent generations can offer new interpretations and meanings that change our view of British architecture's legacy.
ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
#749
Surveillance
A Very Short Introduction
2024
#751
Gender History
A Very Short Introduction
2024
Antoinette Burton argues that gender history is hiding in plain sight, at work everywhere we look.
This volume introduces the field of gender history—its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places since the 1970s.
Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject, what difference gender makes, and how attention to it subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past—and what they are today. The book explores how gender analysis has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration, and empire.
As a field, gender history has been extraordinarily influential in shaping several generations of scholars and students. The fact that its early emphasis on the relationship between masculinity and femininity was part of a larger set of challenges to universal history by poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism positions it at the heart of some of the most fractious intellectual debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And, as part of the movement toward gender equality that is key to modern western progress, gender history has been caught up in the culture wars that continue to shape post-global society. What is intriguing and ultimately defining about gender history is the way that the centrality of gender, so important for revealing how identity is structured in and through regimes of power, has been unable to hold its own over the half century of the field's own history. The practice of gender history has always run up against the forces of race,
class, and sexuality that challenge the singularity of gender itself as an explanatory category of historical analysis. That powerful, unruly tension is at the heart of this Very Short Introduction .
#752
Elections
A Very Short Introduction
2024
Most citizens know how elections work in their own country, but not all elections are created equally.
Elections occur in all democracies and many non-democratic regimes as well. They determine who will hold public office and who will have the power to govern. They connect citizens to those whom they choose to make decisions on their behalf and who regulate their behavior. This book looks comparatively at the key aspects of elections. In addition to describing types of electoral systems, it discusses the implications of the various systems for the administration of elections, voter participation, representation, government stability, and other factors. Where appropriate, it examines efforts to reform a nation's (or a sub-national entity's) system, exploring the impetus for reform and the effects of those reforms when implemented.
A Very Short Introduction asks readers to view election systems critically and comparatively, to understand that all democracies do not function in the same way, to think about the reasons their system functions as it does-for good or ill-and to consider alternatives with which they might not previously have been familiar. L. Sandy Maisel and Jennifer A. Yoder lay out the variety of electoral systems in the broadest terms- single-member district plurality systems; proportional systems; and mixed systems. They discuss voting and the various electoral institutions used to implement the ways in which voting occurs and how votes are tabulated across electoral systems. They analyze the consequences of each system, first for the functioning of the democracy, and second for the electoral strategies politicians employ, closing with a discussion of reforms under consideration in a number of countries.
#754
Civil Wars
A Very Short Introduction
2024
Civil wars are nasty, brutish, and long. Monica Duffy Toft introduces this complex and timely topic.
Civil wars are the most common form of large-scale political violence. In the past thirty years, the study of civil wars has been one of the largest growing segments of the international relations field. Their causes are complex, ranging from fights over access to housing, jobs, and arable land or other resources, to political contests over offices, rights, and representation. Because civil wars tend to drag on, motives and relevant actors shift. Groups form, collapse, coalesce, align and realign, and then fight amongst themselves. Governments themselves change through elections, coups, military defeats, or revolutions. Understanding the origins of civil wars and their trajectories therefore demands some appreciation of the economic, political, social, cultural, and geographic order of societies. If there is one factor that best predicts why a civil war erupts, it is a prior civil war. That is why knowledge of a country's history of political violence, and associated narratives about
who is to blame and why, are critical to understanding where a civil war might next occur. Do insurgents deserve the title of freedom fighters or are they simply criminals or terrorists? If contested resources can be readily divided, how is it that seemingly rational actors so often treat them as indivisible? What is it about identity, or identities, that seem so irreconcilable that they so often lead to an escalation to violence—including violence against noncombatants—and the collapse of governments?
Theories about the causes, the nature, and the termination of civil wars have been adapted from both the international relations and comparative politics disciplines, and there are now many databases, cataloguing hundreds of cases of civil war, that enable sophisticated statistical analysis and formal modeling. As a result, we now have a better understanding of the conditions under which civil wars generally emerge, how the fighting evolves (sometimes involving interventions by external actors), and how civil wars end. However, historical understanding—the human dimensions—remain every bit as critical. This Very Short Introduction explores current debates on civil wars and how the reasons for fighting (and the nature of belligerents themselves) are changing.
#755
The Rule of Law
A Very Short Introduction
2023
Politicians, judges, and citizens commonly use the phrase "rule of law" to describe some good that flows from a legal system. But what precisely is that good? Even in Aristotle's time, there was no agreement on either its nature, and on whether it counted as an unqualified good. Even now, a core rule-of-law aspiration is that law can constrain how power is flexed. But how or when? Disagreement persists as to whether the rule of law is a matter of how law is used or why it is deployed. In consequence, the World Bank, the leaders of Singapore's one-party state, and the Communist Party in China can all offer their own spins on the concept.
By charting these disagreements and showing the overlap and the conflicts between different understandings of the concept, Aziz Z. Huq shows how the rule of law can still be used as an important tool for framing and evaluating the goals and functions of a legal system. He traces the idea's historical origins from ancient Greece to the constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey to the economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. And he explores how that value is coming under pressure from terrorist threats, macroeconomic crisis, pandemics, autocratic populism, and climate change.
#759
The Brain Box
2006
Books that are perfect to pop in your pocket now packaged to make the ideal gift!
Five of the best-selling introductory books on war from the highly acclaimed iVery Short Introductions/i series packaged in a stylish case to make the ideal gift or way-in to the complex area of war and conflict throughout history.
This boxed set gives a great introductory overview to the subject of war, from the strategy and philosophy of ancient warfare, the legacy of the French Revolution, and the impact of the Cold War.
Ancient A Very Short Introduction by Harry Sidebottom
0-19-280470-7/ 978-0-19-280470-9
'This is a little book which is jam-packed with ideas and insights. This book offers an interesting and invigorating read.' TLS
Harry Sidebottom explores the ways in which ancient society thought about Can a war be just? Why was siege warfare particularly bloody? What role did divine intervention play in the outcome of a battle?
The Cold A Very Short Introduction by Robert J. McMahon
0-19-280178-3/ 978-0-19-280178-4
The massive disorder and economic ruin following the Second World War inevitably predetermined the scope and intensity of the Cold War. But why did it last so long? And what impact did it have on the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Third World?
The A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Tyerman
0-19-280655-6/ 978-0-19-280655-0
'An excellent outline of current historical thinking' Sunday Times
With customary flair and originality, Christopher Tyerman picks his way through the many debates to present a clear and lively discussion of the Crusades; bringing together issues of colonialism, cultural exchange, economic exploitation, and the relationship between past and present.
The French A Very Short Introduction by William Doyle
0-19-285396-1/ 978-0-19-285396-7
'\[William Doyle\] writes on the French Revolution with more understanding, balance and clarity than any other historian, living or dead.' Prof. Tim Blanning, University of Cambridge
Beginning with a discussion of familiar images of the French Revolution, garnered from Dickens, Baroness Orczy, and Tolstoy, as well as the legends of 'let them eat cake', and tricolours, Doyle leads the reader to the realization that we are still living with developments and consequences of the
French Revolution such as decimalization, and the whole ideology of human rights.
The Spanish Civil A Very Short Introduction by Helen Graham
0-19-280377-8/ 978-0-19-280377-1
'This is far and away the best short introduction to the Spanish Civil War that I have read in any language.' Professor Paul Preston, European Institute, London School of Economics
An ethical reflection on the war in the context of Europe's tumultuous twentieth century, highlighting why it has inspired some of the greatest writers of our time, and how it continues to resonate today in Britain, continental Europe, and beyond.
Plus a copy of the new edition of A Very Short Introduction to Everything
#760
The Thought Box
2006
Very Short Introduction Boxed Sets
Books that are perfect to pop in your pocket now packaged to make the ideal gift!
Five of the best-selling introductory books to 19th philosophy from the highly acclaimed Very Short Introductions series packaged in a stylish case to make the ideal gift or way-in to a subject area.
This boxed set gives a great introductory overview to the subject of 19th century Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard.
A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer
'an excellent introduction to Hegel's thought... Hegel is neatly placed in historical context; the formal waltz of dialectic and the dialectic master and slave are economically illumined; Singer's use of analogy is at times inspired.' - Sunday Times
A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer
Peter Singer identifies the central vision that unifies Marx's thought, enabling us to grasp Marx's views as a whole. He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. He explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic
theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of communism, in plain English, and concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy.
A Very Short Introduction by Michael Tanner
Michael Tanner's readable introduction to the philosopher's life and work examines the numerous ambiguities inherent in his writings. It also explodes the many misconceptions fostered in the hundred years since Nietzsche wrote, 'Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not!'
A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Janaway
'an excellent brief introduction to Schopenhauer's thought - well-written, concise, and pitched at just the right level.' - Christopher Norris, University of Wales
Schopenhauer's philosophy inspired many artists and thinkers including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Wittgenstein. His central notion is that of the will - a blind, irrational force that he uses to interpret both the human mind and the whole of nature. Seeing human behaviour as that of a natural
organism governed by the will to life, Schopenhauer developed radical insights concerning the unconscious and sexuality which influenced both psychologists and philosophers.
A Very Short Introduction by Patrick Gardiner
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) wrote widely on religious, psychological, and literary themes. His seminal diagnosis of the human condition, emphasizing the significance of individual choice, was his most striking philosophical legacy, particularly for the growth of existentialism.
Patrick Gardiner's beautifully written Kierkegaard makes him come alive both as a thinker and as a human being. ' -Independent
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The Picture Box
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Books that are perfect to pop in your pocket now packaged to make the ideal gift!
Five of the best-selling introductory books on art and architecture from the highly acclaimed Very Short Introductions series packaged in a stylish case to make the ideal gift or way-in to the vast area of art and architecture.
This boxed set gives a great introductory overview to the subject of art and architecture, from the fascinating images created by the renaissance artists to the beauty of practical objects in everyday life.
Art History: A Very Short Introduction by Dana Arnold
ISBN-10: 0-19-280181-3/ ISBN-13: 978-0-19-280181-4
This clear and concise new introduction examines all the major debates and issues using a wide range of well-known examples. It discusses the challenge of using verbal and written language to analyse a visual form. Dana Arnold also examines the many different ways of writing about art, and the
changing boundaries of the subject of art history.
Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction by Geraldine A. Johnson
ISBN-10: 0-19-280354-9/ ISBN-13: 978-0-19-280354-2
Botticelli, Holbein, Leonardo, Durer, Michelangelo: the names are familiar, as are the works, such as the Last Supper fresco, or the monumental marble statue of David. But who were these artists, why did they produce such memorable images, and how would their original beholders have viewed these
objects?
Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction by David Cottington
ISBN-10: 0-19-280364-6/ ISBN-13: 978-0-19-280364-1
As public interest in modern art continues to grow, as witnessed by the spectacular success of Tate Modern and the Bilbao Guggenheim, this much-needed, accessible introduction grapples clearly and provocatively with the complex idea of modern art.
Architecture: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Ballantyne
ISBN-10: 0-19-280179-1/ ISBN-13: 978-0-19-280179-1
'a densely fascinating guide' Steven Poole, The Guardian Review
This highly original and sophisticated look at architecture helps us to understand the cultural significance of the buildings that surround us. It avoids the traditional style-spotting approach in favour of giving an idea of what it is about buildings that moves us, and what it is that makes them
important artistically and culturally.
Design: A Very Short Introduction by John Heskett
ISBN-10: 0-19-285446-1/ ISBN-13: 978-0-19-285446-9
'This is the best book I have read about the design process and is based on the belief that design matters profoundly to us all in innumerable ways.' Terence Conran
John Heskett wants to transform the way we think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal, and the car we drive to work in, to the medical equipment used to save lives. Design combines 'need' and 'desire' in the form of a
practical object that can also reflect the user's identity and aspirations through its form and decoration.
Plus a copy of the new edition of A Very Short Introduction to Everything
Authors
Marya Schechtman
Author · 3 books
Marya Schechtman is a Professor of Philosophy and a member of UIC's Laboratory of Integrated Neuroscience. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1988. She specializes in the philosophy of personal identity, with special attention to the connection between ethical and metaphysical identity questions. She also works on practical reasoning and the philosophy of mind, and has an interest in Existentialism, bioethics, and philosophy and technology.
Aziz Z. Huq
Author · 3 books
Aziz Huq is an Assistant Professor of Law and Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar at The University of Chicago Law School. Aziz Huq earned his BA summa cum laude in International Studies and French from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996 and his law degree from Columbia Law School in 2001, where he was awarded the John Ordronaux Prize. He clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (2001–02) and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States (2003–04). After clerking he worked as Associate Counsel and then Director of the Liberty and National Security Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. He has also been a Senior Consultant Analyst for the International Crisis Group. His research and teaching interests include constitutional law, national security and counterterrorism, federal jurisdiction, legislation, human rights, and comparative constitutional law.
David Leeming
Author · 19 books
aka David Adams Leeming
Oxford University Press
Author · 42 books
Oxford University Press (OUP), a department of the University of Oxford, is the largest university press in the world. The university became involved in printing around 1480, becoming a major source of Bibles, prayer books and scholarly works. It took on the Oxford English Dictionary project in the late 19th century, and in order to meet the ever-rising costs of the work, it expanded into publishing children's books, school text books, music, journals, and the World's Classics series. OUP is committed to major financial support of the university and to furthering the university's excellence in scholarship, research and education through its publishing.
Dudley Andrew
Author · 7 books
Dudley Andrew is a Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University.
Llewelyn Morgan
Author · 3 books
Lecturer in Classics at Oxford University
Thomas C. Holt
Author · 6 books
Professor Thomas Cleveland Holt taught at Howard University, Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Author · 1 books
Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei is Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German and Professor in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include Continental philosophy, particularly phenomenology and existentialism, aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, cognitive literary theory, poetics, philosophy of imagination, modernism, especially modern German literature, and literary ecology. She has previously taught in modern languages departments in the UK (Oxford and Birmingham, at the latter of which she was Chair and Professor of German and Comparative Literature) and was Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. She received a DPhil in German and MSt in European Literature from Oxford; MA and PhD in Philosophy from Villanova; and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. For 2023, she has been appointed Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Gosetti-Ferencei’s research has included books on existentialism, on the philosophy of imagination, on the construction of the exotic in German modernism, on the relationship between the quotidian or everyday experience and ecstatic reflection in phenomenology, modern art and literature, and a critical reading of poetics in Heidegger and Hölderlin. Her work explores the boundaries between philosophy and literature, poetic experience and cognition, and in addition to Hölderlin her work has engaged the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and many other modernist writers. Her work in aesthetics has engaged the visual art of Paul Cézanne, Cy Twombly, Giorgio Morandi, Alfred Kubin, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer. Her book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, won The Paris Review Prize. In On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), Gosetti-Ferencei presents a new interpretation of existentialist thought and literature, exploring, beyond the existentialism of the French phenomenologists, its historical origins in nineteenth century German, Danish, and Russian thought, contributions to existentialism of African-American thinkers, and its relevance for the social and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. Gosetti-Ferencei’s previous book, The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (Columbia University Press, 2018), is grounded in philosophy and a range of other disciplines, including cognitive theory, evolutionary anthropology, aesthetics and literary theory, and offers a new theory of imagination as both emerging from the wider cognitive ecology of our embodied life and engagement with the world, and affording its transformation and transcendence. In contrast to a long tradition of philosophy that sequestered imagination from cognition proper, in this work Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates how imagination must be understood as multimodal, shaping our ordinary experience and affording the heightened manifestations of creativity in scientific discovery and artistic and literary creation. Among other accomplishments of the book is the development of an understanding of cognitive play (drawing from Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Husserl), which show how creativity affords ‘situated transcendence.’ and in so doing both relies upon, and diverges from, the operations of ordinary thinking. This expansive and probing account of imagination demonstrates its reach across human experience and its crucial role in shaping and transforming our relationship to the world. Previous works include Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford University Press 2011), in which Gosetti-Ferencei illuminates the construction of the ‘exotic’ in modern German literature. The rendering of spaces projected as exotic is shown to situate examination of the modern self and its relation to a foreign other, sometimes exploiting, otherwise destabilizing, colonialist or Eurocentric assumptions. She engages prose works of Hofmannsthal, Dauthendey, Hesse, Benn, Brecht, Ku
David Weir
Author · 1 books
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
David W. Macdonald
Author · 7 books
David Whyte Macdonald CBE FRSE is a Scottish zoologist and conservationist. He has done much to popularize biology with the general public. He is known for his documentary films and his popular books, for which he has twice won the Natural World Author of the Year award.
Peter S. Adamson
Author · 2 books
Peter Scott Adamson is an American academic who is professor of philosophy in late antiquity and in the Islamic world at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as well as professor of ancient and medieval philosophy at Kings College London.
Antoinette Burton
Author · 11 books
Antoinette Burton is Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, Department of History, University of Illinois. Among her books are Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India and At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. Also Antoinette M. Burton
Renée Lettow Lerner
Author · 1 books
Renée Lettow Lerner is Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. Professor Lerner is an expert in the fields of U.S. and English legal history, civil and criminal procedure, and comparative law. Her book The Jury: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2023, discusses the history and practice of the jury around the globe. Professor Lerner is also the author, with John Langbein and Bruce Smith, of the book History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions (2009). She is working on a book about the American civil jury, from the colonial period to the present. Professor Lerner advises judges, lawyers, and government officials from the United States and countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia about the differences between adversarial and nonadversarial legal systems. She writes extensively about the history of American juries. Professor Lerner's work includes not only scholarly books and articles, but also online publications intended for a broader audience of legal professionals and the public. In many different settings, she has debated the role of juries with other academics and with lawyers. Her recent writings include “The Resilience of Substantive Rights and the False Hope of Procedural Rights: The Case of the Second Amendment and the Seventh Amendment,” 116 Northwestern University Law Review 275 (2021) and “The Surprising Views of Montesquieu and Tocqueville about Juries: Juries Empower Judges,” 81 Louisiana Law Review 1 (2020). Professor Lerner received an AB summa cum laude in history from Princeton University. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she studied English legal history. At Yale Law School, she was Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Professor Lerner served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 2003 to 2005, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Lerner was a witness in a murder case in Paris, France, before a mixed panel of professional judges and lay jurors.
Joseph T. Glatthaar
Author · 9 books
Military historian, specializing in the American Civil War and American military history
Michael D. Gordin
Author · 8 books
Michael Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he specializes in the history of modern science. In 2013-4 he served as the inaugural director of the Fung Global Fellows Program. He came to Princeton in 2003 after earning his A.B. (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) from Harvard University, and serving a term at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2011 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. He has published on the history of science, Russian history, and the history of nuclear weapons.
David John Wallace
Author · 5 books
David Wallace studied at York and Cambridge. Currently Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, he has held visiting positions at Jerusalem, Melbourne, London, and Princeton. He has served as President of the New Chaucer Society, is currently Second Vice President of the Medieval Academy of America, and has made a series of documentaries for BBC Radio 3. He most recently published Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (2016) and Strong Women (2012), both with OUP.
Angela E. Douglas
Author · 1 books
Angela Elizabeth Douglas (born 1956) is a British entomologist who researches insect nutrition, and is known for her research on symbiotic relationships between insects and microorganisms. She has been the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Insect Physiology and Toxicology at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, since 2008, and previously held a chair at the University of York (2003–8). Source: Wikipedia
Stephen Bullivant
Author · 7 books
Stephen Bullivant is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ethics in the School of Education, Theology and Leadership. He joined St Mary's in September 2009, after completing his DPhil at Oxford University on the Second Vatican Council's engagement with atheism. In June 2010, he was awarded the Catholic Theological Society of America's 'Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award for New Scholars'. He is currently Programme Director for the MA in Theology, for which he teaches the 'Scripture and Systematic Theology', 'Themes in Contemporary Theology', and 'Research and Reflective Practice' modules. On the BA Theology and Religious Studies, Stephen teaches both historical and doctrinal topics (inc. 'Foundations in Christian Theology', 'Trinity', 'Vatican II') and religious studies modules ('Atheism and Nonreligion'). He also teaches 'Christ and Christian Ethics' as part of St Mary's well-established foundation course in Youth Ministry. In addition to his ongoing theological work on - inter alia - the Christian engagement with unbelief, new evangelization, dialogue, and aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, Stephen publishes regularly on the social-scientific study of unbelief and secularity. From 2008 to 2014 he was a co-director of the international Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network. Between 2011 and 2014 he was a committee member of the European Society for Catholic Theology, serving as its delegate to the International Network of Societies for Catholic Theology. A popular speaker and writer, Stephen has appeared on BBC Radio 4 and Vatican Radio, and has written for (among others) New Scientist, The Guardian, America, and Strange Notions. He has also given invited talks and lectures in the United Kingdom, Finland, Italy, Brazil, the Philippines, and the USA.
L. Sandy Maisel
Author · 4 books
Louis Sandy Maisel L. Sandy Maisel is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government and founding director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Colby College, where he has taught since 1971. He is the author or editor of 17 books including American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction and Evaluating Campaign Quality: Can the Electoral Process Be Improved? From Obscurity to Oblivion: Running in the Congressional Primary chronicled Maisel’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Maine’s First Congressional District in 1978. His published articles have appeared in many political science journals and anthologies, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Legislative Studies Quarterly. Maisel has served as president of the New England Political Science Association, twice a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association, and chair of the APSA’s research sections that focus on Political Organizations and Parties and on Legislative Studies. Maisel and his wife, Patrice Franko, who is professor of economics and international studies at Colby, live in Rome, ME. http://www.politico.com/arena/bio/san...
