Vittoria Fallanca (1st-year DPhil, Pembroke College) has been announced as the runner-up for the 2016 R. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize with her work 'The Design of the Essais: Montaigne and the language of ‘dessein’'.
Read all the latest news and upcoming events from the faculty on the main News page.
The University of Oxford has been ranked 3rd in the prestigious QS World University Rankings for Modern Languages, just behind Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, with the coveted top five-star rating for research, innovation, and teaching.
All you ever wanted to know about Les Liaisons dangereuses in five short podcasts: now available here.
Professor Catriona Seth has been re-elected President of SFEDS (Société Française d’Etude du XVIIIe Siècle), the interdisciplinary association of specialists of the 18th century.
The journal Nineteenth-Century French Studies (edited by Faculty member Professor Seth Whidden) has been named the recipient of the 2016 Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
Our school competitions are now open! Please click here for details of the annual French film competition, Oxford German Olympiad, and the NEW Spanish flash fiction competition.
Jack Flowers (Brasenose) has been awarded the Society for French Studies 2016 R.
The University of Oxford, founded some nine centuries ago, has enjoyed the closest links, throughout its long history, with the great centres of learning across Europe.
On June 25th the French Ambassador, Her Excellency Madame Sylvie Bermann made the posthumous award of the highest rank in the ‘Ordre des Palmes Académiques’ to the late Michael Sheringham, who was, until last year, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature. Professor Michel Murat of the Sorbonne came over from Paris for the ceremony and gave the following address:
2016 marks the fifth year of Oxford University’s French film competition, in which school pupils are invited to watch a selected French film, and write an essay or script re-imagining the ending.
The EHRC committee is pleased to announce the first recipients of the new Visibility Award Scheme for staff and students in Modern Languages. Number 4 up is, Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 5x5, the pilot for a multimedia project aimed at making modern language texts more accessible and engaging for today’s students.
Oxford University has come top in the 2016 QS World University Rankings for Modern Languages. The annual QS World University Rankings is a comprehensive guide to the world’s top universities in a range of popular subject areas.
Researchers from six universities with joint expertise in over 40 languages will collaborate with 16 external partners to investigate the connection between languages and creativity in an ambitious research programme funded by the AHRC. The £4 million Oxford-led programme on Creative Multilingualism forms part of the Open World Research Initiative (OWRI), together with programmes led by Cambridge, King’s College London and Manchester. Over four years, they will seek to place languages at the heart of academic and public life.
The EHRC committee is pleased to announce the first recipients of the new Visibility Award Scheme for staff and students in Modern Languages. Number 2 up is the project to roll out a successful blog on poetry and translation
Bids are invited for EHRC small grants (£2,500) that enhance the visibility of research in Modern Languages. This challenge stems from the idea that there is much going on in Modern Languages which would profit from showcasing.
The challenge should be to encourage everybody working in Modern Languages (faculty, librarians, students) to:
think about the visibility of their research in ways which profit their ongoing work
share best practice in documenting outreach, using social media
link up within the university as much as with external partners
Gemma Tidman, a doctoral student at Wolfson working on the French eighteenth-century, has won the prestigious President’s Prize for 2016, which is awarded to the best postgraduate paper at the Annual Conference of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Studie
26 Jan 2016: It is with immense sadness that the Modern Languages Faculty announces the death of Professor Michael Sheringham, FBA, Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls' College, who was Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature from 2004 until his recent retirement in 2015. He died peacefully at home on Thursday 21 January 2016.
Professor Sheringham was one of the leading figures in French studies of his generation, making an inestimable impact on the field of modern French literary and cultural study with landmark works on French Autobiography (1993) and on Everyday Life (2006), and a very wide range of other contributions on Surrealism, modern and contemporary poetry and prose fiction, and most recently on memory and the archive.
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...
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.