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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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What Is Culture For?

From The United Arab Republic, 1963 (Cairo: Information Department) When I started researching the Egyptian Ministry of Culture (formerly National Guidance), I wondered why the government would...

Chihab El Khachab | 15 Apr 2026

Sex and Sports: Transgender Rights and the Culture War Over Girls’ Sports

In recent years, few issues have been as socially and politically fraught and divisive as the question of whether transgender girls should be permitted to participate in girls’ sports. In the United...

Kimberly A. Yuracko | 15 Apr 2026

Bird and prejudice

When we think about prejudice, we think about people. People who are prejudiced against us; people whom we may be prejudiced against (whether we admit it or not). Yet not all prejudice is directed...

Gordon McMullan | 15 Apr 2026

The Political Economy of Rwanda’s Rise

Amid all the changes that have taken place since countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America became independent in the 1960s/1970s, a stark reality has persisted: very few of those newly independent countries...

Pritish Behuria | 13 Apr 2026

What Climate Law Has Been Missing for 1,400 Years

The United Nations Climate Conference (COP 31) will convene in Antalya, Turkey. Muslim-majority countries have hosted two recent COPs in Sharm el-Sheikh and Dubai and are now set to host in Antalya. That...

Oluwakemi A. Ayanleye, Erum K. Sattar, Saba Kareemi, Nadia B. Ahmad | 10 Apr 2026

How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare’s England

Human beings think, speak, and write in metaphors. Those metaphors change as cultures do; people use them to respond to and reshape the world. Indeed, neuroscientists and literary scholars alike have...

Jonathan P. Lamb | 7 Apr 2026

At Sea with Science: Reflections on Climate Education with Author Professor Somerville

Each time our small ship met a big wave, a few plates and glasses crashed to the deck. We were in a storm on the North Atlantic Ocean, on a voyage from the United States to Europe. You need not fear...

Richard C. J. Somerville | 2 Apr 2026

Behavioural economics has been missing a crucial variable: language

For decades, behavioural economics has transformed how we think about human decision-making. It showed that people are not the cold, hyper-rational optimisers imagined by classical economics. We rely...

Valerio Capraro | 31 Mar 2026

Matters of State, and Why does the State Matter?

State Matters began with a life rupture, not a theoretical puzzle. Before it became an intellectual project, it was something I lived through—watching political events tear through ordinary life. For...

Nida Alahmad | 31 Mar 2026

Are we only a dream the bacteria are having?

Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi once wondered if he might be a dream that a butterfly was having. A couple of millennia later, a biologist asks a similar question in Greg Bear’s novel Vitals (2002). “Larger...

Liliane Campos | 26 Mar 2026

Piecing Together Market Regulation and Private Law: The Reconciliation Puzzle

We live in an age of grand challenges, from climate change and the digitalisation of markets to rising inequality. Yet legal systems struggle to respond effectively, constrained by entrenched disciplinary...

Olha O. Cherednychenko | 26 Mar 2026

The Fraying Bonds of Peace

As we live through the transformation of the post-Cold War international order, politicians, diplomats, and scholars have fastened upon the pre-First World War era as a guide to what might emerge in its...

William Mulligan | 26 Mar 2026