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What should you read for ASIL Research Forum 2015?

The fifth annual ASIL Research Forum is taking place on 23-24 October 2015 in Washington, DC. Attendees will present and discuss works-in-progress that explore many topics in international law including energy, financial regulation, international criminal courts, trade, and treaty practice.

To help you prepare for the Research Forum, we have created a reading list that corresponds with the topics discussed at this year’s conference panels, and features works by key contributors to the field of international law. All panels will be held at American University Washington College of Law.

Research Forum Session I


Friday, 23 October, 1:45-3:15 p.m.
Indigenous/Cultural Property

International Cultural Heritage Law, by Janet Blake

International Cultural Heritage Law, as well as the entire Cultural Heritage Law and Policy series, is the perfect companion to this panel. The book examines the links between international cultural heritage and other areas of international law, focusing on the wider policy and cultural context of cultural heritage protection.

Research Forum Session II


Friday, 23 October, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
International Criminal Courts

The Law and Practice of the International Criminal Court, edited by Carsten Stahn

Written by over 40 leading contributors, this title reviews the case law and practice of the International Criminal Court in its first ten years. Panelists will discuss international criminal courts, and you can read about the International Court of Justice with Stahn’s article on the Connally Reservation, available for free on the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law.

International Legal History

The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, edited by Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters

Legal history will be a popular conference topic and this Oxford Handbook comprehensively covers the growth and evolution of international law from the 15th century until the end of World War II. You can read the Introduction, “Towards A Global History Of International Law,” for free on Oxford Handbooks Online. For even more information, browse our History of International Law Timeline, which delves into some of the major developments in the history of international law and features freed-up chapters from the Oxford Historical Treaties, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, relevant books, as well as blog pieces and journal articles.

War & Crime

The War on Terror and the Laws of War: A Military Perspective, Second Edition, by Geoffrey S. Corn, James A. Schoettler, Jr., Dru Brenner-Beck, Victor M. Hansen, Richard B. “Dick” Jackson, Eric Talbot Jensen, Michael W. Lewis, and Foreword by Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.

The War on Terror and the Laws of War applies the law of war to US military practice and offers a practical exposition of the challenges facing military officers on the battlefield. It complements the War & Crime panel, and to prepare, you can read the book’s third chapter, “Targeting of Persons and Property,” for free on Oxford Scholarship Online.

Research Forum Session IV


Saturday, 24 October, 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Health and Environment

Climate Change Impacts on Ocean and Coastal Law: U.S. and International Perspectives, edited by Randall S. Abate

Abate’s volume raises important questions about whether and how ocean and coastal law will respond to the regulatory challenges that climate change presents. Read the book’s first chapter before the panel, which is freely available on Oxford Scholarship Online.

Post-Conflict Issues

International Journal of Transitional Justice, editors-in-chief: Laurel E. Fletcher and Hugo van der Merwe

Laurel Fletcher will present “Transitional Justice and the Demise of State Accountability” at the Post-Conflict Issues panel. Learn more about this rapidly growing field with our collection of freely available articles from the International Journal of Transitional Justice.

Private Lawmaking

Corporate Obligations Under International Law, by Markos Karavias

Markos Karavias’s book analyzes corporate obligations under international human rights law and the Introduction is freely available on Oxford Scholarship Online. He will present “Inducing Compliance with International Law through Private Standard Setting” as part of the Private Lawmaking panel.

Research Forum Session V


Saturday, 24 October, 2:00-3:30 p.m.
International Investment

Development at the WTO, by Sonia E. Rolland

Development at the WTO analyzes the question of the WTO and development from an institutionalist perspective. Sonia E. Rolland will co-present “Predictable, Fair & Development-friendly Investment Protection: Post-BIT Trends from Emerging Economies” at the panel, and you can read the introduction of her book, which has been made freely available on Oxford Scholarship Online.

War, Commerce, and International Law, by James Thuo Gathii

Offering new and compelling arguments about the relationship between war, commerce and international law, this book relates to more than one conference theme. The author will delve further into the international investment side of law with “Regime Shift: How IPR Law Making and Enforcement is Moving to International Investment Law.”

Research Forum Session VI


Saturday, 24 October, 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Refugees & Stateless Persons

OUP’s collection of free resources on refugee law

In response to Europe’s refugee crisis, we have made over 30 book chapters, journal articles, and content from online resources that explore the framework of rights and obligations concerning refugees freely accessible. Browse our collection before the Refugees & Stateless Persons panel, which will discuss child soldiers, refugees and international commerce, and stateless children.

Unconventional Conflict

Cyber War: Law and Ethics for Virtual Conflicts, edited by Jens David Ohlin, Kevin Govern, and Claire Finkelstein

The legal and ethical controversy surrounding cyber warfare is discussed in Cyber War: Law and Ethics for Virtual Conflicts, and this panel will similarly shed light on this timely and important topic.

We hope that you find this reading list helpful in preparing for the ASIL Research Forum. If you are attending the Forum, don’t forget to stop by the OUP booth where you can take advantage of the 20% conference discount to pick up some of these titles and more. We will also have sample copies of our law journals, as well as free access to the online products. See you in DC!

Image Credit: “Washington DC” by BKL. CC  BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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Better medical research for longer, healthier lives

When I started my career as a medical statistician in September 1972, medical research was very different from now. In that month, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal published 61 research reports which used individual participant data, excluding case reports and animal studies. The median sample size was 36 people. In July 2010, I had another look. The two journals published 31 such reports, with median sample sizes of 6,000 people. The journals published fewer research papers, which were correspondingly longer, but with enormously greater sample sizes.

There were other changes. In 1972, only 58% of research papers in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal included the results of any statistical calculations (nearly all significance tests), and only three reports gave any reference to a statistical work, in each case to a textbook which was already out of date. In 2010, all research papers in these journals included details of their statistical analyses, with in one case a paragraph on the methods in the Research Methods section, in all the others a subsection devoted to statistics, and most papers reporting confidence intervals rather than, or in addition to, significance tests. I think that the increased sample sizes, the greater length of papers, and the increased statistical detail are all indicators of greatly increased research quality in the top medical journals.

Image Credit: Test Tube Lab Medical Research by PublicDomainPictures. CC0 Public Domain, via Pixabay.

What led to this research revolution? One force was the movement for evidence-based medicine, spreading the idea that treatment decisions should be based on objective evidence rather than on experience and authority. Such evidence would include statistics. Use of the term evidence-based medicine began in the 1990s with the work of Gordon Guyatt and David Sackett, but the ideas were around long before then. Statisticians, whose business was the evaluation of evidence, were enthusiastic cheerleaders. The demand for evidence led to systematic reviews, where we collect together all the trials of a therapy which had ever been carried out, and try to form a conclusion about effectiveness. Iain Chalmers led a huge project to assemble all the trials ever done in obstetrics. He went on to found the Cochrane Collaboration, which aims to do the same for all of medicine. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal now typically include a systematic review every week.

As an alternative solution to the problem of inadequate sample sizes, Richard Peto led the call for large, simple trials; his first being the ‘First International Study of Infarct Survival’. Published in 1986, the report of this trial included the sample size of 16,027 patients in the title. Unlike Guyatt, Sackett, and Chalmers, who are, or were doctors, Richard Peto is a statistician. Another statistically-led movement was to evaluate evidence using confidence intervals rather than significance tests, particularly for clinical trials. The idea was to estimate the plausible size of the difference between treatments rather than simply say whether there is evidence that a difference exists. A paper by Martin Gardner and Doug Altman in 1986 led to the British Medical Journal including this in its instructions for authors. Other journals, such as the Lancet, followed suit.

Reviews of the quality of statistical methods in medical journals began to sting journal editors into action and led to instructions to authors about statistical aspects of presentation of results. Following reviews of statistics, journals began to introduce statistical referees, with the systematic use of a panel of statisticians to check all research papers before they appeared in the journal. The main difficulty was finding enough statisticians. Finally, in 1996 the first consolidated statement on reporting trials (CONSORT) was published, giving guidelines for reporting trials, encouraging researchers to provide information about methods of determining sample size, allocation to treatments, statistical analysis, etc.

We cannot know which, if any, of these forces is responsible for improvements in the statistical quality of the top clinical literature. We should beware of the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc – just because improvements followed all this activity does not necessarily imply that they were caused by it. As statisticians say, correlation does not imply causation. But I think that the combination of factors did matter and it was exciting to live through it, especially as I have known, and in some cases worked with, nearly all the major actors.

The quality of top clinical research has improved greatly, but does this matter? Has medicine improved? I wondered what might be a good indicator and settled on life expectancy at age 65, the average number of years 65-year-olds would live if the current death rates were to apply through their remaining time. I thought that that the health of the old may respond particularly to improvements in medicine, as the old are its main consumers. I knew that from its first calculation for England and Wales in 1841, life expectancy at 65 changed very little for a century.

England and Wales Life Tables – Graph courtesy of the author.

As the graph shows, in the 19th century there was little difference between the life expectancy of men and women. For women, a slight increase began at the start of the 20th century, which continued throughout the century. One possible explanation for this is that women in the 20th century had far fewer pregnancies than women in the 19th, and so arrived at age 65 healthier and fitter than previous generations. For men, life expectancy at 65 increased very little until 1971. Then it began to rise rapidly, faster than that for women, so that men have almost caught up. Women considerably outliving men may be a 20th century phenomenon, because now expectation of life at age 65 is 18 years for men and 21 years for women. For both, the remaining years of life are half as much again as they were. This period of rapid improvement in statistical methods in the best medical research has coincided with a rapid improvement in the health of the older members of the population. People are living longer, healthier lives.

For the writer of medical statistical textbooks, these changes have required a lot of updating and expansion of succeeding editions, to accommodate the new methods and larger studies appearing in journals. As I am now over 65, I can look back and think that it was definitely worth it.

Featured Image Credit: Running, Runner, Long Distance, by Skeeze. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Naiveté in the US approach to Syria

Another strategic surprise; another flat-footed, perplexed response. Repeatedly blind-sided, chasing the latest crisis, reacting to new realities established by others, and trying to find silver linings in the storm clouds (such as the fact that Putin will have an Afghanistan experience in Syria), the Obama administration has failed to fundamentally reassess its grand strategy of restraint, which has demonstrably reached beyond the point of diminishing returns.

The costs in Syria are apparent. As its options become progressively less viable, we are nearing the point the administration mistakenly thought it was at three years ago, with no effective options for containing the war in Syria.

Was any of this foreseeable? In broad outlines, yes.

I ran an alternate Syria futures exercise at New York University in February 2013, when Assad’s demise seemed imminent to many (though not to the Syrian participants in the workshop). Leaving a ‘light footprint’ was recommended over a more assertive posture, seeing as it minimized the risk of being sucked into another Middle East quagmire and might possibly prevent the secular opposition from being delegitimized.

We developed three scenarios: contained civil war, political settlement, and regionalized conflict. The third, with an escalating stalemate and spill-over into the region, was deemed most likely of the three. The narrative for this scenario, published shortly after the workshop, asked several questions, and suggested some answers:

Can US interests tolerate this degree of regional turmoil?
When will the damage to regional stability and Great Power relations outweigh the risks of more direct participation inside Syria?
Is the United States capable of protecting its Middle East interests—defense of allies, prevention of terrorist safe-havens, WMD non-proliferation, containment of Iran, security of oil flows—as the regional map is violently redrawn?
Can it do so if the Russia/Iran/Hezbollah/Assad coalition prevails?

It is clear that the metastasizing Syrian civil war is a game changer for the region, and possibly for the global system. The management of these shocks is hard to imagine without the presence of American power. Without US leverage to shape events, adversaries will be emboldened. Allies will protect their interests by cutting deals, expanding support for Syrian factions of choice, or, if they have the capacity, by intervening directly—possibly resulting in state-to-state conflict in the region and inviting intervention by Great Powers. The humanitarian crisis will deepen. The already shaky global economy will suffer as the security of energy trade is compromised. Permanent damage will be done to both the region and the structure of international stability and accountability.

The value of alternate scenarios is in providing a futures-oriented context for thinking about the risks and benefits of our range of strategy choices. The President’s choice to restrain the use of American power in Syria appeared to make sense during the early stages of the anti-Assad rebellion and the civil war, when Assad’s days appeared numbered, the existing alternatives to Assad were acceptable, and the war was largely contained within Syria. What was missing was clear-eyed observation as the facts changed, and as the risk/benefit of restraint vs. intervention changed along with conditions on the ground. By imagining, in a plausible and intellectually responsible way, just how nasty Syria could become in the context of regional and greater power relations, our most likely, “Regionalized Conflict” scenario could have provided both an incentive to reconsider the commitment to restraint and a more accurate context for evaluating the meaning of ongoing events.

In order to command this degree of legitimacy and impact, alternate scenarios must emerge from a transparent and defensible process. There is, in fact, an art to scenario construction, as well as a value proposition that rests not on inflated claims of predictive accuracy, but on an opening of minds to the plausibility of futures that contradict the assumptions underlying current strategy. Alternate scenarios must meet tests of plausibility (not necessarily likelihood), distinctiveness (from each other), and relevance (for the user). Useful scenarios begin with research; are based explicitly on drivers of change and emerge from the future intersection of these drivers; are thoroughly debated by experts with diverse skill-sets and points of view; and are further vetted with policy makers to assure relevance.

Having the right grand strategy is essential in shaping and executing foreign policy decisions. All such strategies rest on operating assumptions about how the world works, but also require a willingness to re-examine these assumptions as inconvenient events occur. The recent string of consequential surprises and passive responses indicate an overcommitment to a view of the world at odds with unfolding reality. It will be left to the next administration to apply these lessons.

Image Credit: “Lightning” by Amer Jazaerli. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Why you must stop for coffee and donuts this morning

Sometimes, what your brain wants is not always good for your body. Donuts are a good example. It’s early morning and you’re driving to work after a nice breakfast of black coffee and two eggs, easy-over, with bacon. Yet, you’re still hungry and having difficulty paying attention to the traffic. Why? Your brain is not cooperating because it is not satisfied with that breakfast because it lacked one critical ingredient that your brain urgently needs: sugar. You have been fasting since dinner last night and your blood levels of sugar have fallen. From your brain’s perspective, sugar is indispensable. It will do whatever is necessary to convince you to eat sugar as often as possible. Why? Your brain needs sugar (usually in the form of glucose) to function normally. The billions and billions of neurons in your brain require a constant supply of sugar to maintain their ability to produce energy and communicate with other neurons. Your neurons can only tolerate a total deprivation of sugar for a few minutes before they begin to die. Therefore, as blood levels of sugar decrease with the passage of time since your last meal, you begin to experience a craving for food, preferably something sweet. Essentially, the presence of sugar in your brain is considered normal, and its absence leads to the feeling of craving and the initiation of foraging behaviors, such as seeking out a vending machine for some cupcakes or a candy bar. There is a reason that donut shops and sugar-laden cereals are so popular, and you can lay the blame on neurons within the feeding center of your hypothalamus. If your brain did not want those donuts so badly, the donut shops would not be so densely distributed along your route to work.

Once inside the brain, sugar is also used to produce a very important neurotransmitter chemical call acetylcholine. Acetylcholine allows you to learn and remember, to regulate your attention and mood, and to control how well you can move. Your brain makes acetylcholine from choline, which is obtained from the diet, and from acetyl groups that originate from the metabolism of sugar. We frequently obtain choline in our diet by eating lecithin. Lecithin can be found in many different bakery goods such as donuts and cupcakes and is commonly added to chocolate. Thus a tasty chocolate covered donut first thing in the morning is going to provide your brain with everything it wants and needs to pay attention and learn new things. Sadly, those eggs and bacon that you had for breakfast were completely insufficient for the task of preparing your acetylcholine neurons to function. Ironically, recent research suggests that eating too much sugar ultimately places your acetylcholine neurons at risk of death leading to the symptoms of dementia.

A time for a cup of coffee by Toshihiro Oimatsu. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

As the day progresses your acetylcholine neurons are busy consuming choline and sugar as you spend your day thinking and learning. Your active brain utilizes the equivalent of ten donuts of sugar every day. Now, as evening arrives, you notice that you’re having trouble paying attention and you’re experiencing some mental slowing. What’s happening in your brain and what can you do about it? The cure for your mental slowing: coffee. While you were busy thinking and learning all day another neurotransmitter chemical was increasing in concentration and it has slowly and powerfully begun to turn off your acetylcholine neurons. This chemical is called adenosine. Adenosine inhibits the function of acetylcholine neurons your brain and the longer you are awake the more persuasive is its influence. The caffeine in your coffee is able to prevent the actions of adenosine and release your acetylcholine neurons from their chemical shackles; now your attentiveness improves and you are ready for anything – at least until the caffeine effect wears off.

So, tomorrow morning, without doubt, you are going to crave coffee and donuts because it’s what your brain wants. However, before you stop at the donut shop, please go back and read the first sentence of this piece again.

Featured Image: Doughnuts by Amy. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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An ‘in-spite-of’ joy

The Armenian genocide and the Holocaust took place decades ago, but the novelist William Faulkner was right when he said that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It had been hoped that “Never again!” might be more than a slogan, but in April 1994, the Rwandan genocide began and was soon in full cry. In just 100 days between 500,000 and one million Rwandans, predominantly Tutsi, were killed. As the violence of ISIS reveals presently, the impulses that lead to mass atrocity crimes—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing—continue to wreak havoc and inflict horrific suffering.

The French philosopher Albert Camus thought that even by its greatest effort humanity “can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world.” But, he insistently added, “the injustice and the suffering of the world… will not cease to be an outrage.” That outlook led Camus to contemplate the fate of Sisyphus, the mythical Greek king who passionately loved life and defied fate by thwarting death itself. The gods condemned Sisyphus to a ceaseless repetition that required him to push a weighty rock up a mountain only to have it roll back to the bottom as he neared the top.

Sisyphus riveted Camus’s attention during the return to the bottom, where the burden had to be taken on again. If that descent was “sometimes performed in sorrow,” said Camus, “it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much,” he contended. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

The joy that Camus had in mind was not sentimental, occasional, or fleeting. It was scarcely synonymous with fun. Resistant and resilient, the joy Camus had in mind was what I like to call an ‘in-spite-of’ joy. Refusing to be driven to despair, such joy encourages resistance against atrocity, even if not always victoriously. Kindled and sustained by friendship, by the help that we give as well as receive, by doing what is right and good, by love, such joy sustains solidarity with those who oppose and limit harm, relieve suffering, and save lives. Declining to give in or give up, ‘in-spite-of joy’ keeps people going even when doing so may seems like a forlorn cause.

Brama wjazdowa Auschwitz, by Piotr Drabik. CC BY SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In his book Moments of Reprieve, the Italian Jew and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi touched on related themes by recalling his friend Lorenzo Perrone, the person Levi credited with saving his life in Auschwitz. Not a Jew but an Italian civilian, Lorenzo, a skilled mason, was “officially” a “voluntary” worker helping to build the industrial plant that the Germans were constructing at a place known as Auschwitz III. Established in 1942, this subcamp in the vast Auschwitz complex, also called Buna or Monowitz, housed prisoners—Elie Wiesel and Levi among them—who toiled at the synthetic rubber factory located on the outskirts of a Polish village. In fact, however, Lorenzo was more like a labor conscript, and he despised the German cruelty that he saw at Auschwitz.

After meeting Levi in late June 1944, Lorenzo decided to help his fellow Italian, although it was a crime with grave consequences for Lorenzo even to speak to an Auschwitz prisoner. For months, Lorenzo got Levi extra food, which was the physical difference between life and death. “I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today,” Levi would write, underscoring that Lorenzo’s help meant much more than food alone. What also sustained him was that Lorenzo “constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.”

When liberation came, Levi lost track of Lorenzo, but later he became determined to find out what had happened to his life-saving friend. They reconnected for a short time in Italy after the war, but soon Lorenzo died. At one of their postwar meetings, Levi learned that he was not the only Auschwitz prisoner whom Lorenzo had helped, but Levi’s friend had rarely told that story. In Lorenzo’s view, wrote Levi, “We are in this world to do good, not to boast about it.”

Remote though it often seems, difficult to define though it may be, the possibility that we are in this world to do good remains. More than that, the possibility becomes an imperative if the world is to be less corrupt and savage and more opposed to hatred and terror. I think Levi was right to suggest that it is difficult to define precisely how it is that we are in this world to do good, but it was not difficult for Levi to feel Lorenzo’s “presence” and to discern his “natural and plain manner of being good.” Lorenzo’s presence, his offering to Levi, his ways of being good were oppression-resisting, hope-sustaining, death-defying, and  life-giving. Such qualities are the ingredients that inspire and nourish the ‘in-spite-of’ joy that we need to be part of our lives every day.

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Rediscovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

If you’re a student of African American literature or of the nineteenth century in the United States, you may have already heard about Johanna Ortner’s rediscovery of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first book, Forest Leaves, which has long been assumed lost—perhaps even apocryphal.

This find, shared in the current issue of Common-place, should push us to reconsider how we talk—and don’t talk—about an amazing poet, novelist, essayist, lecturer, and activist whose career spanned seven decades. Harper (1825-1911) has gained a firm place in studies of American literature and culture, but that recognition came only grudgingly and remains far too limited. It is time for more rediscovery.

Her work was initially kept from a white-dominated academy because of her race, gender, politics, and aesthetics. Even supportive critics echoed the backhanded praise of W.E.B. Du Bois’s comments on her poetry and broader work: “She was not a great singer, but she had some sense of song; she was not a great writer, but she wrote much worth reading.”

It wasn’t until the 1980s that Harper’s work moved more completely into American literary scholarship and its classrooms. Even then, it was often Iola Leroy—Harper’s 1892 novel about slavery, Reconstruction, and racial struggle—that garnered attention after it was finally made available in paperback in 1987. The next few years saw both a landmark edition of Harper’s poetry (part of Oxford’s Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers) and an omnibus multi-genre collection with immensely valuable apparatus (A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster). But Harper’s work was still often dismissed as too didactic, too formulaic, too polemical. One pro-Harper article published in 1988 was even titled “Is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Good Enough to Teach?”

Photograph of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Hallie Q. Brown’s Homespun Heroines (1926). Author’s collection.

The years that followed, though, saw a growing group of scholars argue for accepting Harper on her own terms. Scholars like Foster, Hazel Carby, Carla Peterson, Maryemma Graham, and John Ernest alerted us to her writing’s breadth and its multi-faceted depth, reminded us of how much Harper’s contemporaries valued her work, and pushed us to think about the contexts surrounding both production and reception. These years also saw crucial discoveries that widened our sense of Harper’s oeuvre—especially, in 2000, with Foster’s edition of three of her novels that were serialized in the African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper, the Christian Recorder, but never published between boards.

I’m anxious to see what scholars will say as they encounter Forest Leaves for the first time, as a group of my undergraduates will later this semester. The rediscovery offers both “new” poems and new contexts for poems included in her later collections. It also means that we need to question a host of assumptions about Harper, including the longstanding placement of the “beginnings” of her creative work amid a Boston-Philadelphia nexus of abolitionism in the 1850s. Now we can more fully situate the budding poet in antebellum Baltimore, a place readers of Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative would remember being sarcastically referred to as “the Christian city of Baltimore,” a site Douglass marked as full of “bloody-minded” racism.

As we once again rediscover Harper, I’m wondering if this will be the moment when more scholars admit just how much of a presence Harper had in nineteenth-century literature and culture—even if circumscribed by a racist public sphere—and how important her work is today.

In this spirit, I offer a handful of the myriad ways Harper could be integrated into broader discussions of literature and history.

Want more on Solomon Northup’s narrative, the basis for the 2013 blockbuster, Twelve Years a Slave? Try Harper’s October 20, 1854 letter shared in William Still’s Underground Rail Road, which discusses the narrative in advocating for the Free Produce movement.

Want a companion to Toni Morrison’s Beloved that tells much about nineteenth-century Black senses of Margaret Garner? Try Harper’s “The Slave Mother, A Tale of Ohio” (pages 40-42 in the 1857 expansion of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects).

Frontispiece photograph of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Iola Leroy (1892). Author’s collection.

Or for an especially powerful sense of the wake of Harper’s Ferry, read Harper’s letters tied to John Brown (see pages 762-763 in William Still’s Underground Rail Road, for example). Pair this with the amazing poem “Bury Me in a Free Land,” which was sent to one of John Brown’s jailed men.

Or read the stunning brief remembrance of Lincoln in “The Deliverance,” a poem published in her 1872 Sketches of Southern Life that I teach next to Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

While we’re mentioning Sketches of Southern Life, I’ll submit that no course on Reconstruction is complete without reading some of this collection, which was deeply shaped by Harper’s travels in the South after the Civil War.

Want a stunning late nineteenth-century addition to the Ferguson Syllabus or to discussions of Black Lives Matter? Read “The Martyr of Alabama,” Harper’s 1894 poem written on “Tim Thompson, a little negro boy” who “was asked to dance for the amusement of some white toughs.” When he refused because “he was a church member,” he was murdered.

These lines still echo: “And rocks and stones, if ye could speak, / Ye well might melt to tears.” Part of my fascination with them comes from the fact that Harper repurposed these lines from her antebellum “Bible Defense of Slavery,” which appeared in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects but had an earlier life in Forest Leaves. Leave it to Harper to remind us of how much 1894 looked like the 1840s – or 2015.

The list could go on. Each of Harper’s texts offers an amazing doorway to a nineteenth century we’ve only begun to glimpse, and each beckons us to think and act. With the rediscovery of Forest Leaves, we have even more doors and even more reasons to take the journeys they offer.

Image Credit: “Contrabands [escaped slaves] at the headquarters of General Lafayette” by Matthew B. Brady. Public Domain via the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

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Hey everybody! Meet Priscilla!

Please welcome another newbie to the Social Media team at Oxford University Press, Priscilla Yu, who joined the gang in September 2015, just a month ago, as an OUPblog Deputy Editor and Social Media Marketing Assistant! You can learn more about Priscilla below.

When did you start working at OUP?

14 September 2015

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve found about working at OUP?

I was familiar with seeing OUP books at my schools, at the library, and in the bookstores that I visited, but it was a bit of shock to me just how large and global the company is. It’s amazing to see how OUP impacts so many countries around the world.

What’s the least surprising?

There are books everywhere I turn.

Priscilla Yu

What’s the most enjoyable part of your day?

Learning new things. I have only been here a month so far but I have been picking up new tidbits of knowledge each day.

What was your first job in publishing?

I have worked in collaboration with publishing companies before but this would be my first official position within publishing.

What’s your favourite book?

I’ll never get tired of reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

What’s the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?

I make myself an iced coffee (skim milk, no sugar).

What is your favourite word?

Bubbles. You can never say it angrily.

What is the strangest thing currently on or in your desk?

What would autumn be without a cute little pumpkin?

Pumpkin. Photo by Priscilla Yu.

What is in your desk drawer?

Bandaids, a Beato Angelico bookmark from Alice, and a bag of cheddar pretzels

What is your most obscure talent or hobby?

I’m not sure how obscure this is, but I am open water SCUBA certified.

What is your favourite animal?

It’s a tie between elephants for land and dolphins for aquatic. Both are extremely intelligent mammals.

Featured image credit: Photo by TobiasD, CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Lady Macbeth on Capitol Hill

Describing her role as the ambitious political wife Claire Underwood in the American TV series House of Cards, Robin Wright recognized she is “Lady Macbeth to [Francis] Underwood’s Macbeth.” At one point in the second series, Claire emboldens her wavering husband: “Trying’s not enough, Francis. I’ve done what I had to do. Now you do what you have to do.” It’s the equivalent, in the clipped dialogue of the genre, of Shakespeare’s most vehement and brutal image: Lady Macbeth offering to brain her suckling child “had I so sworn / As you have done to this” (1.7.55-9). The Underwoods rework Shakespeare’s ultimate power couple in a modern setting, but violent reactions in the American media to Claire’s characterization show that Lady Macbeth continues to challenge norms of femininity, 400 years after a young male actor first embodied her on the London stage. Those coordinates of sex, ambition, and evil plotted by Shakespeare still resonate. Lady Macbeth is a useful shorthand, as is seen in commentators on Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many other female public figures, to keep women in their place. “Here’s a question for you,” asked one recent tabloid headline, “what’s the difference between Lady Macbeth and Labour’s Yvette Cooper?” The article went on to suggest there was no difference at all; each would stop at nothing to get power for their husband. No male politician, however ruthlessly ambitious, is ever called a Macbeth.

But this popular – and culturally useful – image of Lady Macbeth caricatures the figure we meet in the play. Shakespeare himself does not portray her as a monster. She is, in many ways, the ideal wife: attentive to her husband’s needs and ambitious for him and for what is promised to him. She is a gracious hostess in the service of her husband’s career, welcoming Duncan to Dunsinane and the thanes to a banquet to consolidate the new reign. It’s Shakespeare’s most extended picture of a married couple (his plays tend focus on the flirtatious fun of courtship, or on the life experience of men, particularly widowers). The Macbeths spend more time together on stage as a couple than any other Shakespeare partners: more than Antony and Cleopatra, or Romeo and Juliet, or Beatrice and Benedick. They also enjoy the rarer intimacy of time alone on stage together (think how many Shakespearean lovers are effectively chaperoned by other characters). Theirs is a partnership unparalleled in the canon.

Shakespeare’s development of Lady Macbeth picks up the hints in his source, Holinshed’s history of Scotland, where the wife of Macbeth “lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen.” Shakespeare has amplified and complicated this one-dimensional sketch. His Lady Macbeth is indeed ambitious, but less for herself than for her husband. His letter to her – it must be significant in the power dynamic of their relationship that her first words in the play are actually his, read from the letter – tells her “what greatness is promised thee” (1.5.12). Her response in soliloquy turns those benefits all back to him, as she vows to overcome “All that impedes thee from the golden round” (1.5.27). Never does Shakespeare give her any lines expressive of personal ambition. Unlike the figure in Holinshed, this Lady Macbeth never says she wants to be queen: she is focused on making her husband king.

‘Gower Memorial in Stratford’ by Immanuel Giel. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The popular view of Lady Macbeth is as ruthless and power hungry. She is, as Dr Johnson put it, ‘merely detested’. But Shakespeare’s characterization, again, is more complex. As she tries to choreograph the messy business of murdering of the king, Lady Macbeth suddenly expresses her own vulnerability: “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t,” and her next line, “My husband?,” seems to catch her momentary defenselessness (2.2.13). She pulls herself together when she sees the state he is in, but the lapse is memorable – and unnecessary if she is simply the “fiendlike queen” of Malcolm’s final victory speech (5.11.35).

Again and again, Lady Macbeth seems to show the strain under which she operates. Even as her husband’s mental disintegration takes over the plot and separates the couple, she too reveals the cost of her actions. The sleep-walking scene, famously, shows her mind troubled by conscience as she spools through the events of that terrible night. How should we interpret Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness and death: as a punishment for her transgressive gender behaviour, or as the ultimate sign that she was not actually capable of that evil she attempted to inhabit? Does she sacrifice her own sanity for her husband? Unsurprisingly, modern actors who have played the part of Lady Macbeth have been keen to clarify her motives and to make her more sympathetic. Reviving an old question, ‘how many children had Lady Macbeth?’, has been a common interpretative manoeuvre in contemporary productions, as empty cradles and a child’s unworn bootees signify the internalized pain of stillbirth as motive. As Sinead Cusack put it, discussing her 1986 portrayal at Stratford: “If you’ve lost a child… you either leave the man or you become obsessive about the man and about his happiness and security. That’s the avenue I chose to go up as Lady Macbeth.”

At the time of writing, it remains to be seen whether in series 4 (or beyond) Claire Underwood will complete the Lady Macbeth trajectory hinted at so far in House of Cards. But what is clear is that the popular understanding of the Lady Macbeth character as the pitiless power-hungry political consort does a disservice to Shakespeare’s more nuanced presentation.

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Sex, death, booze, and mung bean sandwiches

How do opera and philosophy intersect? At first glance, this might seem like a strange question, for opera and philosophy are unlikely bedfellows. To speak of philosophy conjures up images of dry abstraction and bookish head-scratching, whereas to talk of opera is to call to mind cacophonous spectacles of colours and voices, of multitudinous audiences enthralled by impassioned song.

Such a stereotype is certainly prevalent, as can be seen in a 2008 spat between two British newspapers. 0n 23 July, the tabloid newspaper The Sun launched an offer whereby all 2268 tickets for the opening night of the Royal Opera House’s production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte) were offered to Sun readers from as little as £7.50 (approximately $12). The offer was quickly criticised by The Sun’s broadsheet rival The Guardian, which claimed that the promotion “smacked of desperation” on the part of the Royal Opera House. On 30 July, the Sun fought back against The Guardian’s perceived high-mindedness with a piece headlined “Sex, death, booze… who said opera is boring?” The article (written before Amy Winehouse’s tragic passing) claimed that “most operas are dirtier than Amy Winehouse’s beehive… and more violent than a Tarantino bloodfest” and went on to refer explicitly to the Guardian’s critical editorial:

Not everyone’s happy we’ve secured the tickets for this much-in-demand first night of Don Giovanni.


Elitist broadsheet The Guardian wrote an article last week sneering at the fact that lowly Sun readers should dare to grace the Royal Opera House.


Blow them. They can have a night in with their mung bean sandwiches and discuss existentialist feminism. We’ll be down the opera having a knees-up [i.e., a “lively party or gathering”].

According to this picture, the abyss between opera (a boisterous knees-up) and philosophy (mung-bean sandwiches and pomposity) could not be deeper. Such a distinction, however, rests on a misguided conception of both opera and philosophy – or, at best, one that is scandalously incomplete.

“Party like it’s 475 BCE”: A depiction of a Greek symposium from around 50 years before Plato’s birth. Fresco from the Tomb of the Diver. 475 BCE. Paestum Museum, Italy. Public domain via Wikipedia Commons.

Philosophy, for a start, has always been less elevated from sensual pleasure than some would like to pretend. Take, for example, Plato’s celebrated work The Symposium (c. 385-370 BC), a foundational text of Western philosophy if there ever was one. This is no monologue, but a series of speeches interspersed with dialogue – and rightly so, since a “symposium” was to the ancient Greeks a real-life social occasion combining philosophical debate not only with more general conversation, but also with eating and drinking, music and (sometimes) sex. And one only has to attend a twenty-first century philosophy conference to see that the bacchanalian spirit is still very much alive, albeit with somewhat subdued levels of amorousness, in some academic circles. Philosophy, then, is nothing if not a knees-up – some of the time, at least.

What about opera? One might here follow The Sun’s own example and consider Don Giovanni, a staple of the operatic repertoire. The plot of the opera revolves around a young Count whose aim in life is to seduce as many women as possible.

The opera recounts the Count’s amatory adventures before a conclusion in which he is sent to hell for his sins, and the remaining characters sing joyfully (in Questo è il fin di chi fa mal) of his deserved punishment.

To have such a conventionally cheerful lieto fine ending hot on the heels of the lead character’s damnation raises unavoidable moral questions – not least whether it is ever right to celebrate the damnation of another, however deserved. Depending on one’s interpretation, this troubling scene could look back to the moral certitude of Dante’s Inferno, with a villain meeting his due come-uppance, or forward to the absurdism of Albert Camus’ novel L’Étranger with an anti-hero affirming the perceived meaninglessness of life (a trope famously embodied more recently by Vince Gilligan’s Walter White from the television show Breaking Bad). Either way, it encourages its audience to consider searching moral questions about desire, sin, empathy, mercy, and human and divine justice. Indeed, in the opera as a whole, the moral nihilism of the Count’s womanising raises urgent issues precisely of existentialist feminism – the very subject that The Sun attempted to contrast with a night at the opera… with a night at this opera!

The irony of The Sun’s contrasting “sex, death, and booze” with mung bean sandwiches and existential feminism, then, is not only that philosophy can – sometimes, at least – be a knees-up, but also that, in its exploration of sensual pleasures and existential terrors – sex, death, and booze included – opera engages with and can cast new light on key philosophical questions.

Much more might be said about the myriad ways that opera and philosophy intersect. I haven’t touched, for example, on the hotly debated question of what opera itself actually is, pursuit of which would take us into the labyrinthine philosophical realms of ontology and aesthetics. Nor have I considered operas, such as Mozart and Da Ponte’s Così fan tutte, whose plots revolve explicitly around the thoughts and actions of philosophers, or the Royal Opera House’s laudable decision to commission four new operas, due to premiere in 2020, based on critical questions chosen “in collaboration with” philosopher Slavoj Žižek. To conclude, however, I want only to make a simple point. To speak of “opera and philosophy” is not to endeavour to bring together two incommensurable entities. On the contrary, it may be an impossible attempt to separate two entities that are all too often inextricably entangled in a fertile embrace.

Featured image credit: Royal Opera House Auditorium. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Landscapes of meaning

This week, we’re bringing you another exciting edition of the Oral History Review podcast, in which Troy Reeves talks to OHR contributor Jessica Taylor. In addition to discussing her article, “We’re on Fire”: Oral History and the Preservation, Commemoration, and Rebirth of Mississippi’s Civil Rights Sites, the podcast touches on the importance of listening to the priorities of community members when launching an oral history project. She also discusses the way spaces are memorialized, and how the limits of historical preservation can make it easier to maintain some stories at the expense of others.

Image Credit: “Emmett Till Marker.” Image Courtesy of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Used with permission.

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