Oxford University Press's Blog, page 392

Women of letters

During the Enlightenment era, the term “man of letters” (deriving from the French term belletrist) was used to distinguish true scholars—independent thinkers who relished debate, conversation and learning. In an age when literacy was a distinct form of cultural capital, it served to identify the literati, often the French members of the “Republic of Letters,” who met in “salons” designed for the elevation, education, and cultural sophistication of the participants. One explicit assumption is made in this phrase however, that the participants are male.

This Women’s History Month, we are delving into the lives and letters of two eighteenth-century women who broke through these assumptions, arguing for women’s education, intellectual respect, and cultural participation. Hester Lynch Piozzi and Elizabeth Montagu were two true “women of letters,” both esteemed and appreciated in their own right as culturally refined cognoscente. They came into contact through the “Blue Stockings Society,” a group co-founded by Montagu which emphasized female literary and philosophical discussion—a radical departure from traditional non-intellectual women’s activities.

As a social reformer, patron of the arts, salonist, critic, and writer, Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) wasn’t scared to voice her own academic opinions. In a letter to Edward Wortley Montagu, she makes her views clear on Helvétius’ latest philosophical text De l’esprit (a work envisioned to rival Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws): “I think this author a wretched philosopher, a poor metaphysician, a detestable moralist, but he is a man of great wit, infinite memory and much reading.”

“Portrait of Elizabeth Montagu by Allen Ramsay, c. 1762.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Indeed, through her own work promoting women’s education and social reform, Montagu was a well-respected “moralist” and staunchly defended religious and intellectual principles from the “sophists” and “buffoons”:

There are but two kinds of people that I think myself at liberty to hate and despise, the first is of the class of soidisant philosophers, who by sophistry would cheat the less acute out of their principles of religion, the only firm basis of moral virtue; the second are witts who ridicule whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report. The lowest animal in society is a Buffoon. He willingly degrades himself in the rank of rational being…

In her London salon, Montagu carefully cultivated a generation of intellectuals, writers and artists, with guests including Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, and Fanny Burney. The “surprise” of such a gifted female host was not left un-noted, with Edward Young (an author and literary critic) writing to Montagu:

Was I a Saint and could work miracles I would reduce you two ladys to the common level of your sex being jealous for the credit of my own; which has hitherto presum’d to boast an usurp’d superiority in the realms of genius and the letter’d world.

Elizabeth Montagu met Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–1821) through the Blue Stockings Society, however her initial impressions were somewhat mixed. She respected Piozzi as a shrewd business woman, with “uncommon endowments” and a “love of literature,” but also disagreed with her personal and private life (Piozzi’s second marriage was to Gabriel Mario Piozzi, an Italian music teacher deemed beneath her social status). Piozzi was more radical than Montagu in her views on class, marriage, and divorce in particular, noting a relative’s recent nuptials:

“Portrait of Hester Thrale and her daughter Hester, c. 1777” by Joshua Reynolds, from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Suzette leaves town tomorrow if I am right, and consummates her marriage with Mr Ashgrove: If like many modern couples they should be soon tired of the binding words to have and to hold, she may get a divorce any day…

Like Montagu however, Piozzi (who is best known for her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson) was deeply supportive of other women (and men’s) cultural and intellectual work. In 1818 she described her joy at the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as she could not bear that “women should be outdone in virtue and knowledge by men”:

Mary has just published her first work a novel called Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus…I am delighted and whatever private feelings of envy I may have at not being able to do so well myself yet all yields when I consider that she is a woman and will prove in time an ornament to us and an argument in our favour. How I delight in a lovely woman of strong and cultivated intellect. How I delight to hear all the intricacies of mind and argument hanging on her lips…I cannot bear that women should be outdone in virtue and knowledge by [men].

Akin to Women’s History Month, last week’s International Women’s Day asked us to #BeBoldForChange—calling for a better, more inclusive, gender equal world. With the historical examples of Montagu and Piozzi and their achievements as “women of letters” in mind, in what ways can we tackle inequality today?

Featured image credit: “A lady writing by Johannes Vermeer, c.1665–1666” from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Reconstructing the nation’s memory of the Civil War

The history of black people during the Civil War and Reconstruction has been the subject of some of the most vicious and inaccurate portrayals of any other group in US History. But that just might be changing.

On 12 January, President Obama dedicated the first national park in Beaufort, South Carolina, to Reconstruction, a period that historians have, over the last 150 years, defined as “a failure,” “tragic,” and “an unfinished revolution.”

But it’s not just the National Park Service that is attempting to correct this misinterpretation, the PBS series, “Mercy Street,” will commence its second season on 22 January 2017, by exposing the untold story of black refugees during the Civil War. This will be the first episodic or cinematic portrayal that charts the deadly transition from slavery to freedom that led to over 60,000 freed slaves dying of smallpox. The traditional narrative of emancipation triumphantly details the destruction of slavery with the coming of the Civil War but neglects the outbreak of a smallpox epidemic that devastated the population of freedpeople throughout the South, most poignantly in places like Beaufort, the site of the first monument to Reconstruction.

The 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation lampooned black suffrage during Reconstruction by including depictions of black elected officials barefoot and eating fried chicken. Ken Burns’ 1990 television documentary series, The Civil War, sanitized the story of emancipation and neglected the biological attacks on freedpeople during the war. The public memory of emancipation remains a narrative about the heroic destruction of slavery and the progressive march toward citizenship and suffrage, which overlooks the refugee crisis that emancipation engendered.

“The history of Reconstruction has often been politicized and told inaccurately.”

Designating Beaufort as the site of the first national monument will correct this historical amnesia. During the Civil War, Beaufort was the site of the “Rehearsal for Reconstruction.” Due to the large number of enslaved people who freed themselves in the early years of the war, the federal government sent military officials and Northern women to serve as teachers to develop the blueprints for the rebuilding of the South. When the military and the teachers arrived, they soon realized that they needed to first respond to the refugee crisis that emancipation sparked. Northern teachers frantically wrote to their families and friends to send clothing and food, while the military wrote detailed reports about the suffering and poor conditions that freedpeople endured. During the last five years, historians have begun the crucial work of documenting the ways in which slavery did not lead immediately to freedom but instead led to many formerly enslaved people becoming refugees.

While the naming of Beaufort as a national park for Reconstruction will begin to tell this forgotten history, the second season of “Mercy Street“ will offer the first visual narrative of this crisis, particularly of the smallpox epidemic that stretched from Alexandria—the setting of season two of the show—to Beaufort, and other parts of the Low Country South and Mississippi Valley. In a “Behind the Scenes” video for season two, a black female character who is a Northern abolitionist and activist for the freedpeople, alerts a white doctor to the smallpox epidemic. This is the first time in the history of television or film that the smallpox epidemic is featured as a central plotline in a story about emancipation. Despite liberation, not all slaves made it to freedom, and many died in this transition.

The history of Reconstruction has often been politicized and told inaccurately. In the early part of the twentieth-century, historians narrated it as a failure in order to justify the subjugation of black people during the Jim Crow period. W.E.B. DuBois, a noted black intellectual, challenged that portrayal in his book, Black Reconstruction, but even this laudable intervention did little to alter the public memory of the period. The emergence of the civil rights era in the 1960s led to scores of historians shattering the earlier depictions of freedpeople by revealing how formerly enslaved people were robust actors in the rebuilding of the nation. While this scholarly movement was widely accepted, the public understanding of Reconstruction remained uneven and misunderstood.

The naming of a national park in remembrance of Reconstruction will transform how the public understands the period after the Civil War. Its location in Beaufort will highlight the refugee crisis that followed the ending of slavery, and the PBS series “Mercy Street” will offer a more accurate depiction of black people. The nation will finally view what Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Lincoln’s seamstress and founder of a relief association for black refugees, observed in 1862 when she witnessed the arrival of former slaves from the South to Washington, DC: “Instead of flowery paths, days of perpetual sunshine, and bowers hanging with golden fruit, the road was rugged and full of thorns, the sunshine was eclipsed by shadows…Poor dusky children of slavery, men and women of my own race—the transition from slavery to freedom was too sudden for you!”

Featured image credit: “Field” by Michael R. P. Ragazzon. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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How to “bee” a smart animal

Researchers continue to rewrite the book on accepted notions of animal smarts.

In 2002, Oxford University researchers made history by showing tool use in a bird. A female Caledonian crow rivaled the intelligence of primates in getting to her food.

Now bees bask in the spotlight, caught rolling yellow balls towards a soccer goal. One might think that the phrase ‘bees playing soccer’ belongs in the domain of fiction, but it’s now a trending search term thanks to scientific research on animal cognition. Researchers in the United Kingdom at Queen Mary University, London just published evidence that bees can learn ‘soccer’ in one of the world’s top peer-reviewed science journals.

Video via CNN.

In mesmerising footage, bees doggedly move balls almost their own size across the floor until they sit in the middle of a marked circle, the ‘goal’. A medicine dropper descends from the sky dispensing food as reward. For this liquid treat, the bees avidly push the balls, just as in another other training-for-reward experiment. Soccer-bees acquire their skills by watching an already trained bee or even an ‘artificial bee’ manipulated by humans. What it shows is that bees are ‘smart enough’ not just to ‘play soccer’ but to mimic and thereby learn. What else might bees be capable of learning in nature and how do they use these skills in the wild?

From primates to cetaceans, to birds to insects such as soccer playing bees, science continues to reveal the brains of the animal world.

While science continues to push back the accepted boundaries of animal intelligence, everyone can contribute to this white-boxing of the natural world. Today, scientists are aided in documenting animal abilities by an unusual source: our social media addiction to ‘cute animal’ clips. The Internet is a growing treasure trove of animals doing the unexpected, and some of it counts as very smart.

For the down-right clever, there’s a seal who can tell the time and emerges from the ocean at 9am, 1 pm, and 4 pm for feeding. A dog was trained to play pool, revealing both an understanding of the concept of targeting balls and the uncanny ability to do it. We are inured of the super-hero antics of squirrels completing obstacle courses to raid bird feeders, but have you ever seen a rodent engineer? This hamster arranges building blocks to reach treats.

Many touching videos show animals being empathetic, such as this cat who nurses sick animals or caged gorillas enjoying a visit from a tiny lizard. When empathy meets ingenuity we see behaviours such as a dog letting out his caged puppy friend to play once those fun-spoiling humans are safely asleep.

The public is turning out to be, whether knowingly or not, animal ethnographers. The diversity of pets, farm animals, and wild animals they track with lens is exposing the rarest of behaviors. These behaviors not only make intriguing viewing but serve to widen our thinking about the animal world and perhaps diminish our iron-gripped hold on cleverness.

Might we be less willing to destroy creatures whom we believe are ‘smart’? Bees used to be prevalent and abundant but now are appearing on the endangered species list. Might we better seek to protect bees, which are threatened by a range of human activities, once we appreciate how they can learn?

Might we be kinder towards animals if we believe they share feelings more like ours? Here are two circus elephants remembering each other after 22 years and bending the metal bars of their enclosures to greet each other properly with trunks and ‘hugs’. All manners of animals play just for fun, like this bird riding a walking sidewalk or this white beluga whale ‘scaring’ onlookers. Animals can exert their will, as in this baby panda who wants attention and this nonplussed cat who plays dead.

We continue to gain insights about even our closest of animal companions. One of the most common internet memes is ‘guilty dog’ (‘Did, you eat that donut, Fido!?). Science suggests these dogs aren’t guilty but showing fear. How often are we still getting things wrong? How much more do we have to learn? Soccer-bees suggest volumes.

Featured image credit: Bumble Bee by dennisflarsen. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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How brain scans reveal what really goes on in our minds [excerpt]

Every year in March, Brain Awareness Week champions the global campaign to celebrate and publicise the progress and benefits of brain research. Uniting the efforts of research hospitals, universities, government agencies, and professional organizations, from around the world BAW shines a light on the human brain from the latest technological techniques in neuroimaging to cutting edge improvements in medical intervention for psychiatric disorders.

In the excerpt below from Sex, Lies, and Brain Scans, Barbara Sahakian and Julia Gottwald explain how fMRI is changing the diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Are you lying? Do you have a racial bias? Is your moral compass intact? To find out what you think or feel, we usually have to take your word for it. But questionnaires and other explicit measures to reveal what’s on your mind are imperfect: you may choose to hide your true beliefs or you may not even be aware of them.

But now there is a technology that enables us to “read the mind” with growing accuracy: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It measures brain activity indirectly by tracking changes in blood flow. Your brain is constantly active, even when you sleep. This activity changes depending on what you do. If you start a new task, the brain areas involved in this process will alter their activity. If a brain area becomes more active, it needs energy, and so more oxygenated blood will flow in this region thus making it possible for neuroscientists to observe the brain in action. Because the technology is safe and effective, fMRI has revolutionised our understanding of the human brain. It has shed light on areas important for speech, movement, memory and many other processes.

Researchers are beginning to unravel the brain circuits involved in self-control, morality, sexual arousal, and lying. Some of us may want to use this knowledge to screen for criminals or use fMRI scan data as evidence in a murder trial or detect racial biases. But we must keep in mind that fMRI has many limitations. It is not a crystal ball. We might be able to detect an implicit racial bias in you, but this cannot predict your behaviour in the real world.

01 Siemens MAGNETOM Trio by Image Editor. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

An exciting development is that of real-time fMRI. With this technique, neuroimaging data can be analysed online while the subject is still in the scanner. This analysis can be used to give the subject feedback about their brain activation in real time, so-called neurofeedback. Such feedback can be used to learn how to actively control your brain activation, for example to control your perception of pain.

Innovative study designs have helped to make neuroimaging studies more realistic. A recent study led by our colleague Paula Banca from the University of Cambridge used live video material while the participants were in the scanner. The aim of the research was to learn more about the neural basis of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). These patients suffer from compulsions (repetitive behaviours the patient feels compelled to carry out) and/or obsessions (intrusive, distressing thoughts that enter the patient’s mind). In so-called symptom-provocation designs, researchers try to trigger such obsessions or compulsions to find out what is happening in the patient’s brain. Such knowledge is important for a deeper understanding of disorders and to develop new treatments. These obsessions and compulsions differ between individuals—not every patient is afraid of germs or feels compelled to clean excessively. It is therefore important to design these symptom-provocation studies in such a way that they trigger the personal obsessions and compulsions of the patient.

Our colleagues developed a creative new design: the researcher went to the patient’s home and, with the permission of the patient, performed actions that were tailored to the patient’s symptoms. For example, for a patient concerned with symmetry and organization, the researcher would mess up their sock drawer or bed. Live video material of this disorganization was then streamed and shown to the patient, who was undergoing fMRI. Patients were free to stop the procedure at any time. The researchers found that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area behind the forehead, acts as the key region in a circuit modulating compulsivity. Such a creative approach can give us new insights into the underlying neural circuits of obsessions, compulsions, and many other conditions.


What new possibilities and insights will fMRI offer? And what ethical dilemmas might result?


While many applications are still science fiction, they might become reality sooner than we imagine. We will need to decide how and where we want to allow mind-reading or neuromarketing.


Should we screen for (implicit) racial bias with the help of neuroimaging? Does fMRI-based lie detection violate the privacy of thought? Should we test how moral or self-controlled a person is to prevent future crimes?

These are just some of the important ethical questions that will need to be debated and answered by society as a whole.

Featured image credit: IMG_9549.CR2 by Stephen Hampshire. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Celebrating the history of traditional Irish music on Saint Patrick’s Day [a playlist]

The celebratory nature of Saint Patrick’s Day marks the coming together of and relishing in the rich history of Ireland, with traditional festivities occurring all over the world – parades, dances, cèilidh (traditional social gatherings) and for many people–lots of drinking and eating!

An important aspect of these festivities is of course reveling in the colorful and eclectic range of traditional music; music which represents the diversity of Ireland’s history, and music that continues to flourish today; swathes of styles rooted to the land and influenced and inspired by many social changes including the suppression and emigration of Irish people across the world.

Particularly during the Great Famine and the intense migratory period, the Irish people would often play songs of longing and sadness for their homeland as they made roots on continents far from their native soil (a fundamental example being the United States). Thanks to the influences of further worldly musical styles including American folk and Jazz, traditional Irish music saw an important revival in the later 20th century, a revival instigated by the descendants of Irish settlers and a movement which proved just how relevant and durable the legacies and lessons of traditional Irish music were years later.

Traditional Irish music was and still is, used for various reasons. Although unaccompanied vocals called sean nós (“in the old style”) are considered the ultimate representation of traditional singing, Irish folk music has developed in both the English and Irish languages. Whilst Caoineadh songs, (or laments) often expressed the pain and sorrow and longing for Ireland, much of Irish traditional music was meant for dancing at celebrations; weddings, social gatherings and saint’s days.

Whether it be for the purposes of singing, lamenting, or dancing; traditional Irish music remains an ever reverent and thriving genre in modern times. From haunting ballads to popular glass-clanking drinking songs filled with merriment, many popular Irish musicians continue to gather their inspirations from a rich heritage of Irish styles and instruments.

Saint Patrick’s Day is an overarching celebration of Irish memory and history, and in spirit of this–Oxford University Press have created a playlist to help you commemorate the day in the appropriate way–with singing, dancing and all matters of frivolities! Let us know your favorite Irish songs, be they traditional or modern or anything in-between.

An OUP approved playlist:

Featured Image Credit: “Waterfall, Bach, Galeway, Ireland” by Christian_Birkholz. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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War, movies and Sam Fuller: A Q&A with Marsha Gordon

American screenwriter, author, and director of over 20 films, Sam Fuller influenced the work of filmmakers the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Luc Moullet. Marsha Gordon, author of Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies, sat down for a Q & A with Matt Shipman of The Abstract to discuss the work of this legendary filmmaker. The following was originally published in The Abstract.

The Abstract: When did you first become interested in Sam Fuller and his films?

Marsha Gordon: I came to Fuller rather late in the game. In fact, I saw my first Fuller film when I was a Master’s student at the University of Maryland in the 1990s. I was taking a class on 1950s film and culture from one of the great thinkers and writers about American film, Robert Kolker. The film he showed the class was Pickup on South Street, which I write about in Film is Like a Battleground all these years later. I was immediately drawn to it and to the many shocks and surprises it offered. My interest in that film led me to seek out the other films Fuller made in this time period and beyond.

TA: What sets Fuller aside as an auteur?

Candy (Jean Peters) and Skip (Richard Widmark) have a volatile, combative relationship in Sam Fuller’s Cold War Noir Pickup on South Street (1953, Fox), a film that is really about what motivates people in the open market of money, ideology, and emotions.

Gordon: I just finished teaching a course on Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder in the fall of 2016 at NC State, so I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about the subject of authorship and film. To my mind, Fuller had an unusual dedication to dealing with issues that personally mattered to him in the movies he wrote and directed, despite the significant difficulties in doing this on screen.

The most recurrent and important of those subjects had to do with war and patriotism. And right alongside those concerns were questions about humanity and American society that were not commonly asked on the big screen in the 1950s, especially having to do with race. Like Billy Wilder, Fuller was a writer and also a frequent producer of his own films – so he often had a significant amount of control over their content, which was both liberating in terms of his personal creativity and challenging in terms of his responsibility for their political content.

TA: Normally, when we think about assessing a filmmaker’s body of work, we want to consider all of his films. Why did you decide focus solely on his war films?

Gordon: There are have been a number of books published about Fuller over the years, though nowhere near as many as about his contemporaries like John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, and so on. Fuller fought in World War II and obsessively documented it: in personal and official military journals as well as in journalistic writing, on 16mm film, in photographs, and in screenplays and books. It was the experience that defined his psyche and his moral compass, and informed his thinking about the world and the American way of life.

It just seemed natural to me to isolate his war films, starting with the 16mm films he shot during and after the war (including the aftermath of the liberation of a Nazi camp) and moving on to his combat films as well as his cold war films. This really gave me a sharp focus on the central idea that Fuller dealt with throughout his career. It also allowed me to explore the nature of war filmmaking in the United States and the intense scrutiny it received in the 1950s in particular. I was also able to delve into Fuller’s difficult relationships with the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Production Code Administration, and the other military watchdog organizations that had a stake in how American military and political interests were represented at the time.

TA: Focusing on just one part of Fuller’s body of work could sacrifice some of the context provided by other films in his canon, such as his Westerns or later films, like White Dog. How do you balance the desire to focus on a single genre with the absence of context provided by Fuller’s other films?

Three of the exhausted survivors at the end of Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (1951, Lippert Pictures), the first Hollywood feature made about the Korean conflict. Image courtesy Chrisam Films, Inc.

Gordon: Well, I do acknowledge the fact that combat was the overarching metaphor for Fuller’s career, even in the films he made that had nothing seemingly to do with war. But since other books have already been published about Fuller that provide a career overview, I didn’t feel obligated to repeat that. Also, this focus allowed me to dig deep. I’m working with archival sources, such as the documents in Fuller’s Department of Defense file at the National Archives in Washington DC, which nobody has discussed before.

Limiting the number of Fuller films I discuss in the book – eight feature films, plus several other shorter, nontheatrical films – allowed me to be thorough in a way that I believe does justice to those works.

TA: I’m guessing you watched Fuller’s films quite a few times while working on the book. After repeated viewings, which one stands out as a favorite? What is it about that film that makes it stand out?

Gordon: That’s a cruel question! I think I have to go with Pickup on South Street. Maybe it’s that it was the first Fuller film that I saw. Maybe it’s the great performances from Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, and Thelma Ritter (who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role).

Maybe it’s the use of extreme close-ups and jarring camera movements, which sets the film apart stylistically. Maybe it’s the fantastic dialogue and playful use of street slang, which Fuller must have had so much fun working with. Maybe it’s the treatment of the New York City criminal underworld, the police, and the FBI – with the criminal coming out on top. It also has one of the most poetic, haunting, and dark murder scenes in the history of American film. I could go on and on, but if you haven’t seen it by all means do!

Featured image: Movie print with soundtrack on 35-mm b&w positive film ‘Svema’. Photo by Runner1616. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Dance of black holes trembles our Universe

The existence of gravitational waves, or ripples in the space-time, is no more just a speculation but a firm truth, after the recent direct detection of such waves from at least two pairs of merging black holes by the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. In such a binary system, two black holes orbit each other at a close separation, nearly at the speed of light, whirling the spacetime in their neighbourhood. Such a disturbance propagates throughout the Universe along its fabric of spacetime, carrying away energy from the binary, which causes the black holes to spiral towards each other and ultimately merge into a single black hole. But how are such tight binary black holes formed? The surest way involves star clusters: the Universe’s gravity reservoirs.

Most, if not all, of the stars in the Universe form in densely-packed spherical groups or clusters, which are held together by the constituent stars’ mutual gravitational pull. When their hydrogen fuel is exhausted, the brightest stars in a cluster collapse into black holes. These black holes, being still the heaviest entities in a cluster, sink and densely gather at the cluster’s center. The close-packed black holes there move randomly and undergo energetic interactions with each other, often forming tight black hole binaries. In fact, the powerful interactions within the tiny ensemble of black holes in a cluster’s stomach make it serve as the entire cluster’s powerhouse. Following the first LIGO detections, there is now a renewed momentum to understand this process better than ever, which would prove critical in interpreting the forthcoming LIGO detections.

In a recent study conducted by Dr. Sambaran Banerjee of the University of Bonn, most detailed and self-consistent computer simulations to date of this scenario have been performed. Even until recently, such simulations have typically been done either with black holes of similar weights (about ten times heavier than the Sun) or by following approximate numerical strategies, so that the calculations were deficient in one way or the other. In reality, the weight can vary widely from black hole to black hole; typically being from about ten to about 100 times that of the Sun. At the same time, it is important to do the calculations as realistically and accurately as possible, since the success of the scenario and its outcome depend on how well the intricate interactions among the black holes are treated. In the latest study by Dr. Banerjee, both of these aspects are well taken care of. Here, models of star clusters with realistic details are evolved in supercomputers. Each such cluster is assembled in a computer with up to hundreds of thousands of stars. Each star’s internal evolution, its orbit, and all sorts of encounters that it undergoes are tracked closely, which is done for all stars simultaneously. After their birth through collapse of massive stars, the black holes are also treated in a similarly elaborate manner, taking into account of the relativistic nature of the interactions among them. The models also vary in the chemical composition of the stars, that affects the formation and the masses of the black holes. That way, the evolution of the model clusters are followed in the highest possible detail until they become as old as the Universe. These comprise the most advanced computer simulations of the “black hole engine”. From these calculations, the type of binary black hole mergers detected by the LIGO could be explicitly reproduced.

“these simulations, for the first time, reveal that many of such gravitational-wave emitting black hole binaries could actually be parts of triple black holes”

Moreover, these simulations, for the first time, reveal that many of such gravitational-wave emitting black hole binaries could actually be parts of triple black holes (or possibly even a binary black hole orbited by a normal star) located inside the clusters. In contrast, until now, it was largely thought that such mergers mainly happen in binaries which are kicked out of the clusters. This is, firstly, a newer insight into the phenomenon that has not been properly realized until now. This might also affect the nature of the mergers seen by the LIGO; for example, binary black hole mergers driven by triples can possibly show up with residual eccentricities and atypical amplitude modulation. Furthermore, since such triple-driven mergers happen right within the clusters, they are going to tell not only about the black holes and their binaries but also about their host clusters, e.g., how dense they are or their chemical composition. Of course, for this, one needs to pinpoint the location of the merging binary black hole in the cosmos, which will hopefully become possible within a decade when there will be a network of gravitational-wave detectors over the globe.

The new study predicts that some tens to hundreds of such mergers should be detected yearly by the LIGO, as the instrument keeps improving. Now that the future space-based gravitational-wave observatory LISA has just been approved by the European Space Agency as an official mission, which will be able to probe the binaries in much greater detail, it is only the dawn of such studies.

Featured image credit: BBH gravitational lensing of gw150914 by American Astronomical Society (AAS Nova)/SXS and LIGO Caltech. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Six underrated Irish women writers

To celebrate both Women’s History Month and St. Patrick’s Day, the Oxford World’s Classics team has picked just a few of our favorite—and sometimes underrated in Irish literary history—female writers from our series. Ireland is known for producing many influential writers, but the men typically get a lot of the credit and a lot of the attention. Tell us your favorite Irish writer in the comments below.

Maria Edgeworth

Favorite novel: Castle Rackrent

Favorite quote: “We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.”

Maud Gonne

Favorite political work: The Famine Queen

Favorite quote: “And the reply of Ireland comes sadly but proudly, not through the lips of the miserable little politicians who are touched by the English canker but through the lips of the Irish people.”

Augusta Gregory

Favorite drama: The Rising of the Moon 

Favorite quote:

“MAN [sings].


“As through the hills I walked to view the hills and shamrock plain,


I stood awhile where nature smiles to view the rocks and streams,


On a matron fair I fixed my eyes beneath a fertile vale,


And she sang her song it was on the wrong of poor old Granuaile.”

“SERGEANT.


“Stop that; that’s no song to be singing in these times.””

Sydney Owenson

Favorite novel: The Wild Irish Girl 

Favorite quote: “‘A wake, as it is called among us,’ he replied, ‘is at once the season of lamentation and sorrow, and of feasting and amusement.”

Eva Gore-Booth

Favorite poem: “Women’s Rights” 

Favorite quote:

“Oh, whatever men may say


Ours is the wide and open way

“Oh, whatever men may dream


We have the blue air and the stream.”

Ethna Carbery

Favorite poem: “The Passing of the Gael” 

Favorite quote:

“The whip of hunger scourged them from the glens and quiet moors,


But there’s a hunger of the heart that plenty never cures;


And they shall pine to walk again the rough road that is yours.

“Within the city streets, hot, hurried, full of care,


A sudden dream shall bring them a whiff of Irish air–


A cool air, faintly-scented, blown soft from otherwhere.”

Featured image credit: “Typewriter, book, notepad…” by unsplash. CC0 Public Domain via   Pixabay.

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Why we are failing to end wartime rape

In recent years, the world has become all too aware of the prevalence of rape and other forms of sexual violence perpetrated in war. This form of gendered violence has repeatedly made headlines, such as the mass perpetration of rape in South Sudan, Darfur, Burundi, and the DR Congo.

As a result, gender-based violence has become an increasingly common consideration in foreign policy agendas, with sexual violence becoming the cornerstone of the women, peace, and security agenda of the past decade. Recognized in at least 13 UN Security Council resolutions passed since 2000, ‘conflict-related sexual violence’ is considered as serious of a security threat as nuclear and biological weapons, terrorism, and arms proliferation.

But when is rape a weapon of war? Despite decades of analysis and years of research on the topic, we still seem to have very little understanding about why sexual violence occurs in war and what we can do to prevent it in the future.

Instead, as influential as this policy and aid regime has been for bringing international attention to gendered forms of insecurity that occur during times of conflict, the harmonized “rape as a weapon of war” narrative has produced an unsustainable and ineffectual paradigm that is based ultimately on the fetishization of this violence. Armed groups are increasingly attracted to perpetrating rape to see their names in headlines and to get a seat at the bargaining table to voice their grievances. Aid organizations and NGOs in war zones are forced to compete for the same limited pool of funds, duplicating ad infinitum the same medical and social services strictly for victims of war rape, with no money to treat victims of other forms of war-related violence or the wider social, political, and economic effects of the conflict. Some people lie about being raped to access these services, while others lie about providing psycho-social care to get international aid funding.

Wartime sexual violence has become a tradeable commodity in international security. As such, it is no wonder that current efforts to end conflict-related sexual violence – international conferences, high level UN meetings, resolutions and agreements between governments – are failing.

Conflict-related sexual violence is considered as serious of a security threat as nuclear and biological weapons, terrorism, and arms proliferation.

While the security framework of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ is arguably preferable to the previous paradigm of neglect, the explicit focus on the mass use of sexual violence can obscure, or even deny the significance of other forms of sexual violence that coincide with conflict. It can also serve to homogenize the perceived purposes of mass rape, which is counterproductive in the pursuit of understanding the underlying causes of its use in war. Rather, the global policy regime that has emerged to respond to conflict-related sexual violence has focused on this type of violence as a profound insecurity that must be addressed at the strategic and tactical level, without highlighting the connections between the sources of insecurity in women’s lives both in times of peace and in war, or to place these specific forms of gendered violence on a continuum of violence. It overlooks the violence women experience in their daily lives within national borders, marginalizes other forms of violence that an intersectional gender perspective makes visible, including sexual violence by men against men, violence perpetrated by armed troops after a conflict, or within their own ranks, and that perpetrated by the UN’s own peacekeeping forces.

We need to disaggregate ‘rape as a weapon of war’ and the catch-all policy term ‘conflict-related sexual violence,’ in order to examine the contextual drivers of this violence within different types of conflicts. What makes individual men in the Congo take up arms and then use them to commit both opportunistic and systemic acts of rape? Is it the same as the men who commit acts of sexual torture on behalf of the Sri Lankan government against Tamils? Do their motivations mirror those of paramilitaries employing rape against indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations in the Colombian countryside? What about the enslavement of women by ISIS?

What is needed to understand and effectively address conflict-related sexual violence is an analysis of the production, construction, and exploitation of gendered violence within the particular contexts in which it occurs. I advocate for a political economy approach to understanding sexual violence in conflict, which recognizes the material bases of this violence, and how globalized economic and political structures relate to local gender inequalities that gives this violence its particular instrumentality in different conflicts.

Sexual violence is an effective instrument in different types of conflict because it works across different levels of gender, producing dividends not only in terms of individual gender identity (being a sexually virile and potent male warrior) but also in terms of socio-cultural constructions of gender (being a fearsome and powerful group), and in the global political economy (enabling the extraction of resources, access to land, or labour).

Thus, any serious attempt to tackle the problem of sexual violence as either a weapon of war, a tactic of terror, or an instrument of genocide, will require efforts to understand how the violence relates to the particular conflict dynamics in which it occurs, including both the social, political, and economic inequalities that often give root to armed conflicts, and the underlying gender inequalities that construct sexual violence as an effective means to achieve a political or economic agenda. This is by no means an easy task. However, until both the root cause of wars and the root cause of sexual violence within it are addressed, any direct efforts to ‘take the rape out of war’ are likely to remain ineffective in the long term.

Featured image credit: Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict by Foreign and Commonwealth Office. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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How and when to quote

I have a confession to make. I often skip the long blocks of quotes when I am reading academic articles and books. I suspect that I’m not the only one who does this.

I don’t skip the quotes because I’m lazy. I skip them because they often pull me away from a writer’s ideas rather than further into them. The writer has put a voice and an idea in my ear only to cede the floor to another voice, that of some quoted authority. A long quote, or worse, a series of them, can leave me asking “Yes, but what was your point again?”

How does all this over-quoting arise? In school, teachers require beginning writers to cite sources in their summaries, paraphrases, and direct quotations, but some students confuse research with mere quotation and the weakest of them write research papers consisting of a series of whole paragraphs quoted from different sources. Like this:

Quotations are used for a variety of reasons: to illuminate the meaning or to support the arguments of the work in which it is being quoted, to provide direct information about the work being quoted (whether in order to discuss it, positively or negatively), to pay homage to the original work or author, to make the user of the quotation seem well-read, and/or to comply with copyright law. Quotations are also commonly printed as a means of inspiration and to invoke philosophical thoughts from the reader. (Wikipedia)

As writers get more sophisticated, they learn to find primary sources, to identify a source’s authority and stance, and to discuss the relevance of the quote to their own points. But many writers still quote too much and for the wrong reasons. Over-quoting can become a lifelong bad habit.

When is it a good idea to quote? You should quote when you want to amplify a source’s point with additional support and new evidence. And you should certainly quote when you want to disagree with a source. Letting the source speak for himself or herself helps to show that you are not mischaracterizing a writers’ views when you challenge them.

You also should quote when the language of the original is particularly significant, controversial, or evocative. That includes most literary quotations and many technical ones. But after you quote a technical point or definition, it is important to reestablish your voice by explaining why the quote matters. And before you quote you should provide some context to what follows and introduce your sources bona fides. This is the well-known “quote sandwich” consisting of framing, quote, and commentary.

When should you think twice about quoting? It is always a bad idea to quote if you are unsure of what the source is saying.

When should you think twice about quoting? It is always a bad idea to quote if you are unsure of what the source is saying. When we are new to a topic or discipline, it is tempting to cite some technical language about a troublesome concept, hope the reader understands it better than we do, and change the subject. Such a quote-and-run approach is a recipe for frustrating the reader.

There is also the temptation to quote at the ending of a section of an article or chapter to sum up a discussion with someone else’s insight. Often, though, the quote will hang out there like an orphaned idea. Unless you can say why a quote is important in your own words, consider leaving it out.

I also suggest avoiding long quotes if you are just citing someone who agrees with you. If you are both taking the same position, the reader doesn’t need to hear it twice. Just summarize the point of agreement and move onto what you want to say. If the source’s reasoning is important to your exposition but not the actual language, a paraphrase will often suffice, perhaps with a short key phrase quoted. Paraphrasing and summary (with appropriate citations, naturally) allows you to maintain your own voice in a piece of writing. As you become more immersed in a topic and more of an expert, you will tend to quote less: more things will be common knowledge to you and the expert audience you are writing for.

Quotes can be an important part of a writers’ toolbox, if they are used strategically. If you follow the relatively simple suggestions, your quotes will be more effective and readers will skip fewer of them.

And you can quote me on that.

Featured image credit: “The ‘Library'” by Quinn Dombrowski. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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