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We are happy to announce that booking for Professor Jonathan Thacker's Inaugural Lecture 'The World as Stage in Spain’s Golden Age' is now open.
The event will take place on October 16th, 2018 (Tuesday of 2nd Week, Michaelmas Term) at 5 o'clock. The location is the Main Hall of the Taylor Institution. All are welcome to attend. For further details and to reserve your place, see below.
It is with great sadness that we share the news of Dr Valerio Lucchesi passing away on September 2nd, 2018 at the age of 91.
Dr Lucchesi joined the Italian Sub-Faculty at Oxford in 1966, was University Lecturer in Italian and then Fellow of Corpus Christi College from 1970 until his retirement in 1994.
Our thoughts are with Valerio's wife, Joyce. Information on the funeral and memorial service is included below.
Oxford Open Doors is the annual weekend when when we celebrate the city: its places, spaces and, most of all, its people. The Taylor Institution Library is taking part in the Oxford Open Doors event this Saturday, September 8th, 2018.
Library staff will be giving guided tours to small groups throughout the day, and visitors will be taken to the Voltaire Room to view an exhibition. We hope that this will not cause any disruption, as visitors will be advise that the library rooms are for quiet study. If you have any queries, do not hesitate to contact Joanne Ferrari (joanne.ferrari@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).
The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages is very sad to report that Dr David Pattison passed away on September 3rd, 2018 at the age of 76.
Dr Pattison was appointed Tutorial Fellow in Spanish at Magdalen College in 1969, and held the post until his retirement in 2005 when he became an Emeritus Fellow. During his illustrious career he acted as Chairman of the Modern Languages Faculty Board and also served as President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland.
The Faculty's thoughts are with David's family at this time. Information on the funeral and memorial service is included below.
All members of the Faculty are warmly invited to the launch of The White Rose project and exhibition on Friday, October 12th. The event will take place in Room 2 at the Taylor Institution from 5 o'clock in the evening. There will be a short talk, a chance to view the exhibition, and refreshments. The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance exhibition will continue in the Voltaire Room until the end of October.
Booking for the launch event is required.
Kieran Hodgson, an alumnus of the Faculty, has been shortlisted for the best comedy award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2018. His show '75 is an exploration of the prehistory of Brexit, dating not to the referendum of June 2016, but back to the 1960s and '70s.
Advertised as 'an overambitious hour of history, politics and enduring friendship punctuated by stunningly accurate impressions of dead politicians you've never heard of', '75 has been a success, with the critics especially praising Hodgson's considerable skills as an impersonator.
The show will be running until August 26th, 2018, and further details can be seen on the Pleasance Theatre Trust website. We wish Kieran the best of luck with the performances and with his nomination.
Open Days provide an excellent opportunity to visit the Faculty and meet our tutors and students. We welcome prospective applicants to have a look at libraries and classrooms, and to learn more about the admissions process and studying at Oxford.
The next University of Oxford Open Day will take place on Friday, September 14th, 2018. The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages will be holding information sessions on all three dates; booking is required. To reserve your place at the Open Day, please, follow this link.
2018 marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most remarkable instances in the history of German Resistance: the White Rose group trials. To commemorate this event, there will be an exhibition in the Taylor Institution, entitled The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance. The exhibition will run from October 12th to 31st in the Voltaire Room of the Taylorian. It will present information on the members of the White Rose and their resistance activities, as well as examples of literature which influenced them to oppose Nazism.
We are pleased to announce that Professor Jonathan Thacker will be giving his Inaugural Lecture as the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies on October 16th, 2018 (Tuesday of 2nd Week, Michaelmas Term 2018). The title of his lecture will be ‘The World as Stage in Spain’s Golden Age’.
Together with the Taylor Institution, we are commissioning a new translation of the White Rose leaflets, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the trials of the German Resistance group. This project is open to all students of German about to begin the second or fourth year in Michaelmas 2018. Applications will also be considered from students who are not studying German, but who are confident translating between German and English.
We are glad to announce that registration is now open for the international conference Women in Transition — Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries. The conference will take place from Thursday, September 20th to Saturday, September 22nd, 2018 at St Peter's College, University of Oxford and at the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-American Studies, King's College London.
The conference is open to the public upon registration. For further details, please, follow this link.
It is our pleasure to announce that the inaugural issue of The Oxford Polyglot, the Faculty e-newsletter, has now been published and can be seen in its entirety here. Professor Ian Watson, Chair of the Faculty Board, has provided the introduction, and the articles have been written by colleagues across Sub-Faculties, on topics varying from Romantic objects to Angolan women writers to epitaph fictions in late-medieval France and the friendships of the great German poet Goethe.
We hope that you enjoy learning about our research, activities, and events (find out about those in 'Our Events'). If you would like to be among the first to receive the future issues of The Oxford Polyglot, please, subscribe here.
On June 19th members of our Schools Liaison team ran an Oxford Language Day at Bridgwater and Taunton College in Somerset. At this event pupils from local schools met with University lecturers to learn about language study, receive taster sessions in French, German, and Spanish, and hear about life at the University of Oxford.
The Language Day is part of the larger Outreach programme undertaken by the Faculty to engage with young people in regions that are historically under-represented at Oxford. We encourage talented students across Britain to follow the opportunities and careers opened up by a degree in languages — and we are happy to answer any practical questions.
We are happy to announce that Professor Catriona Seth (Fellow of the British Academy, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford) was recently made an associate member of the Académie Royale de Belgique — Belgium's National Academy, which was founded in 1772 under the aegis of Empress Maria Theresa.
On the occasion, Professor Seth was commended on her research, interdisciplinary approach to literary discourse, her work as an editor and as a specialist in Women's Studies. The new title was seen as especially appropriate given the Academy's background and Professor Seth's expertise in literature and the history of ideas of the long 18th century.
Our congratulations to Professor Katherine Ibbett, whose book Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France has been awarded the Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize 2018. The prize is given biannually to encourage original research on any aspect in the field of Renaissance studies and to recognise significant accomplishments by members of the Society.
Compassion's Edge was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018, and is available from the Bodleian Libraries, including Taylor Institution Library. The title has been commended by SRS for its 'brilliant interdisciplinary range and relevance' and 'promises to inspire fresh scholarship in early modern French history'.
Open Days provide an excellent opportunity to visit the Faculty and meet our tutors and students. We welcome prospective applicants to have a look at libraries and classrooms, and to learn more about the admissions process and studying at Oxford.
The University of Oxford Open Days 2018 will take place on Wednesday, June 27th, Thursday, June 28th, and Friday, September 14th. The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages will be holding information sessions pm on all three dates; booking is required. To reserve your place at an Open Day, please, follow this link.
We were saddened to learn of the death on 8 June 2018 of Roger Pensom, Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College and formerly University Lecturer of Old French Language and Literature at the University of Oxford; he was 79.
The 18th edition of the Forum for Iberian Studies will take place in Oxford on the 20 and 21 June at the Taylor Institution.
From Sunday, June 24th to Tuesday, June 26th 2018 the international conference Médialité des odeurs / Mediality of Smells will take place at Maison Française d’Oxford and Jesus College. This event is jointly convened by Dr Jean-Alexandre Perras (Jesus College, University of Oxford) and Dr Érika Wicky (Fonds National de La Recherche Scientifique and Université de Liège).
The study of scents and all things olfactory is currently thriving, a sign of the great interest that our information-based societies feel for a sense which seems to offer a direct and immediate experience of reality. The conference Mediality of Smells aims to develop the nascent interdisciplinary exchange around smells by examining the question of the media and the possible mediatisation of smells.
We are delighted to announce that the seventeenth R. Gapper Book Prize, given annually by the Society for French Studies, has been awarded to Professor Roger Pearson for his book Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France (OUP).
The prestigious R. Gapper award yearly commends books of critical and scholarly distinction which have a clear impact on the wider critical debate. Professor Pearson's exploration of the public role of the poet in the nineteenth-century France has been honoured for its engaging and in-depth research of the topic.
Our congratulations to Dr Helen Swift, too, for being commended for her book Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Boydell & Brewer). Dedicated to the literary representations of the dead, this volume analyses works in prose and verse, and casts fresh light on the ideas of selfhood in medieval culture, as well as on contemporary conceptions of literary representation itself.