6 January 2016: More than 100 students and academics from Oxford University have translated extracts from great French writers of the eighteenth century to demonstrate the importance of freedom and tolerance in French literature and thought.
A book of these translated quotations is to be published tomorrow to mark the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.
The book can be read for free online.
It is targeted at the general public and the authors hope it will be used for teaching in schools.
Dr Caroline Warman of the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, who led the project, said: ’We hope people will be excited by the texts and that it will help them to reflect on the world we live in now.
'We want this book to reach people thinking about tolerance and intolerance, and to inspire them to connect with our history, as they discover that major European thinkers of the past also wrote passionately about these topics.
Read all the latest news and upcoming events from the faculty on the main News page.
6 January 2016: More than 100 students and academics from Oxford University have translated extracts from great French writers of the eighteenth century to demonstrate the importance of freedom and tolerance in French literature and thought.
A book of these translated quotations is to be published tomorrow to mark the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.
The book can be read for free online.
It is targeted at the general public and the authors hope it will be used for teaching in schools.
Dr Caroline Warman of the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, who led the project, said: ’We hope people will be excited by the texts and that it will help them to reflect on the world we live in now.
'We want this book to reach people thinking about tolerance and intolerance, and to inspire them to connect with our history, as they discover that major European thinkers of the past also wrote passionately about these topics.
6 January 2016: More than 100 students and academics from Oxford University have translated extracts from great French writers of the eighteenth century to demonstrate the importance of freedom and tolerance in French literature and thought.
A book of these translated quotations is to be published tomorrow to mark the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.
The book can be read for free online.
It is targeted at the general public and the authors hope it will be used for teaching in schools.
Dr Caroline Warman of the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, who led the project, said: ’We hope people will be excited by the texts and that it will help them to reflect on the world we live in now.
'We want this book to reach people thinking about tolerance and intolerance, and to inspire them to connect with our history, as they discover that major European thinkers of the past also wrote passionately about these topics.
The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University is looking for budding film enthusiasts in Years 7-11 and 12-13 to embrace the world of French cinema. Read more...
5 Aug 2015: Martin McLaughlin has been elected President of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) for 2015. Each year, the MHRA chooses as President a scholar of international repute. Professor McLaughlin’s Presidential Address, entitled ‘Rewriting in the Italian Literary Tradition: Dante to Calvino (but not everything in between)’, will be delivered as a keynote lecture at the MHRA annual conference: this year’s conference is entitled ‘Rewriting(s)’ and will be held on Friday 16 October 2015 at the Senate House, London. More information is available here and here.
17 Jul 2015: The Faculty is delighted to congratulate Professor Annette Volfing, Professor of Medieval German Literature, on her election as a Fellow of the British Academy.
Fellowships are awarded to highly distiguished UK academics in recognition of their outstanding research. More details are available here.
25 Jun 2015: PhD candidate Diego Rubio has won the 2015 Award from the BritishSpanish Society for his substantial contribution to our understanding of the Early Modern Political Thought and the cultural history of Britain and Spain.
The Awards Ceremony was hosted by the Ambassador of Spain to the United Kingdom at his residence in London in May 2015. Mr Rubio gave a speech on the value of the Humanities and the importance of scholarships to ensure equal access to higher education.
The BritishSpanish Society is a registered charity and a non-political organisation which aims to promote friendship and understanding between the people of Britain and Spain through knowledge of their respective customs, institutions, history and way of life. Thanks to the generous support of corporate and institutional sponsors, the Society runs an annual scholarship programme for postgraduate students. The scholarships are awarded on the basis of academic merit to British and Spanish students to enable them pursue postgraduate studies and, in the process, foster British-Spanish understanding between individuals and institutions.
23 Jun 2015: Dr Daron Burrows has secured a research funding award from the Bodleian Library’s Digital Manuscripts Toolkit initiative (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) for his project The Apocalypse in Oxford: Anglo-Norman Apocalypse Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. This project involves the digitisation of five richly illustrated English manuscripts of the French Prose Apocalypse, a thirteenth-century translation of the Revelation of St John accompanied by a lengthy moralising commentary which sheds important light on ways in which the Apocalypse was imagined and interpreted in the Middle Ages. Combining textual transcription and image analysis, the project marks an important step towards Daron’s eventual goal of producing the first critical edition and study of the transmission of this fascinating text.
20 Feb 2015: Colleagues will be delighted to know that Professor Patrick McGuinness was last night awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for his latest novel, Other People’s Countries, a Journey into Memory (Jonathan Cape). The award was made at a reception at the French Ambassador's Residence, sponsored by Pol Roger. The prestigious literary prize was founded following Duff Cooper's death in 1954, to "celebrate the best in non-fiction writing", and recent winners have included Lucy Hughes-Hallett (on D'Annunzio), Sue Prideaux (on Strindberg), Sarah Bakewell (on Montaigne), Robert Service (on Trotsky) and Graham Robb (Discovery of France).
Professor Catriona Kelly, FBA, Professor of Russian and Fellow of New College, is to be congratulated on being pre-elected as President of the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for 2015. This is first time that a scholar not working at a University in the United States has been elected as head of the main international professional organisation in Slavic Studies. More information is available here:
http://aseees.org/about/board/election2013-pres.php
Professor Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, and Fellow of St Anne's, an established poet and novelist, has just won the prestigious French literary prize, Le Prix du Premier Roman étranger, for the translation of his novel, Les Cent derniers Jours (Grasset, 2013). This novel has also been shortlisted for two other major French prizes for fiction, the Prix Femina and the Prix Médicis. The English original, The Last Hundred Days (Seren, 2011), which describes the fall of Ceauşescu in Romania in 1989, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2011, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and other prizes, and in 2012 won both the Wales Book of the Year and the Writers' Guild Award for Best Fiction Book. The Faculty extends its congratulations on the international success of this novel, widely acclaimed by reviewers, such as the TLS, for the "the sardonic crispness and evocative power of its language [which] distinguishes it from the run of contemporary fiction", and in the New Statesman as "dark, immaculately written, bitterly lucid and very gripping."
Edwin Williamson, the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies and Fellow of Exeter College, has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for two years from October 2015 to complete a book on “The Making of Don Quixote: How Cervantes Came to Write the First Modern Novel”. This will be a critical study of of Cervantes's evolution as a writer during the last three decades of his life (1585-1616), with a particular focus on the process of composition of his great masterpiece, now a classic of world literature, in the context of the author's other writings and the Spanish culture and society of his time.
The schools liaison office in the Oxford French sub-faculty is proud to announce the launch of Adventures on the Bookshelf. A collaborative project run by the staff and students in French at the university, the blog is aimed at pupils and teachers of French in Years 11 to 13, and anyone with an interest in French language and culture who may be considering applying to study them at Oxford. It combines lively posts about French language, literature and culture, insights into student life, and reviews and recommendations for French books, films, apps and websites, along with information for prospective applicants about how the Oxford admissions process works from UCAS form to interview, and what you can do to prepare for it. Please do check it out, and let us know what you think.
The OUSU Teaching Awards Ceremony was held in the Weston Library on 28th May 2015. For the category of Outstanding Tutor there were 250 nominations, with a shortlist of four in the Humanities section, including two Modern Languages Tutors. The winner was Dr Vilma de Gasperin, Senior Instructor in Italian, to whom we offer warmest congratulations.
Professor Karen Leeder has been awarded a year long Knowledge Exchange Fellowship for the Mediating Modern Poetry: Reception and Dialogue project. She will be working with the Southbank Centre, London to curate a series of events exploring aspects of modern European poetry and its transmission. A first focus is a specially curated evening exploring the reception of Rainer Maria Rilke for the biannual festival ‘Poetry International’ (July 2014). Rilke’s influence on modern culture is inescapable and has inspired poets from Auden to Zwetayava along with filmmakers, thinkers, composers and artists. An evening will be given over to events ‘After Rilke’ featuring major English-language and German poets and their wide-ranging responses to the poet and his life (translations, versions, new poems). This will feed into Leeder’s own project on ‘An English Rilke’, which teases out what makes an author travel like this and what happens to them en route (tackling a wide range of issues along the way). Thereafter a series of further events in Autumn 2014 will explore aspects of contemporary poetry in dialogue with major English and...
The Faculty's Portuguese Year Abroad students have been given a blog space by BBC Brasil, and the first post has been published, with a lively response from Brazilian readers.
We are sorry to announce the death of Dr Jim Naughton, who died on Sunday whilst an inpatient at the Churchill Hospital.
Jim was a much-valued member of the Modern Languages Faculty, whose warmth, intelligence and friendliness will be sadly missed. He came to Oxford from the University of Lancaster in the 1980s to take up a position as University Lecturer in Czech and Fellow of St Edmund Hall. During his 26 years in Oxford, he fulfilled a variety of roles within his College and served as Chair of the Faculty Board.
His tutorial teaching straddled College and University, as for most of his time in Oxford he was the only teacher of his subject. Both undergraduates and postgraduates greatly valued their contact with him and some have remained in touch for many years. He is well-known in the world of Czech studies for his grammars of the Czech and Slovak languages, as well as for his translations, for example of the short stories of Bohumil Hrabal.
A funeral service will take place in the St Edmund Hall Chapel on Wednesday 26 February at 12.30pm, followed by a burial at Wolvercote Cemetery at 2.00pm. Please contact the Revd Will Donaldson...
Sarah Hickmott, a DPhil student in the Faculty, has won this year's R H Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize for her essay '(En) Corps Sonore'. The judging panel viewed the essay as 'an outstanding piece of critical reflection'. The prize is awarded by the Society for French Studies for an essay written by a postgraduate in English or French, of fewer than 6000 words, on any subject within the scope of French studies.
Emma Claussen is joint runner-up
Emma Claussen, another Faculty DPhil student, was awarded the runner-up prize for her essay on ‘Pour cognoistre les Politiques’: A study of the term ‘Politique’ in the Dialogue d’entre le Maheustre et le Manant and the Satyre Ménippée.
Annette Volfing has been elected to the 'Kommision für Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters' (Committee for German literature of the Middle Ages) of the Bavarian Academy of Science and Humanities. This body has oversight of a number of prestigious research projects, notably the monograph series MTU (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen) and a project devoted to the cataloguing of German-language illustrated medieval manuscripts. The committee, chaired by Professor Jan-Dirk Müller, has a small and very distinguished membership. In recent years, Nigel Palmer has been the only non-German member. For further details, see http://www.badw.de/orga/klassen/kl_phil/k_23_dlma/index.html
One of the Faculty’s graduate students, Amaranta Saguar García, supervised by Dr Juan-Carlos Conde of the Sub-Faculty of Spanish, has been announced as one of the winners of the prestigious Fifth International ‘Academia del Hispanismo’ prize. The prize is awarded to the best doctoral theses completed during the year in the field of Hispanic Literature. Amaranta will have her work published by Editorial Academia del Hispanismo as a result of this success. Her thesis dealt with Fernando de Rojas’s medieval masterpiece, Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (better known simply as the Celestina).