The Oxford Muse Foundation
The Oxford Muse Foundation (www.oxfordmuse.com) was formed by Zeldin in 2001. It describes its aims as being "to pioneer new methods to improve personal, work and intercultural relationships in ways that satisfy both private and public values."
One of its principal projects is the Muse Portrait Database. Individuals are free to submit their own self-portraits, including whatever they want the world to know about them. However, many of the portraits are written by another person in the "voice" of the subject, as the result of a conversation between the two. The Oxford Muse claims that, through such conversations, it can help people "to clarify their tastes, attitudes and goals in many different aspects of life; and to sum up the conclusions they have drawn from their experiences in their own words."
A selection of these portraits can be found in Guide to an Unknown City (2004), which contains the writings of a wide variety of Oxford residents, and in Guide to an Unknown University (2006), which, Zeldin claimed, "allowed professors, students, alumni, administrators and maintenance staff to reveal what they do not normally tell one another."
Read more about this topic: Theodore Zeldin
Famous quotes containing the words oxford, muse and/or foundation:
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man’s subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman’s subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1907)