Professor Michael Sheringham

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.

20 Jan 2016: The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages has been successful in obtaining HEFCE funding under the National Network for Collaborative Outreach scheme. This is funding a joint project with the MML outreach and schools liaison team at the University of Cambridge.

The NNCO grant will provide funding of £5000 towards this outreach project, and match-funding has been provided by the Ferreras Willetts Family. The project will provide bursaries for MFL teachers from the maintained sector to attend conferences organised by the MML societies of the two universities, the Robert Taylor Society at Oxford and the Oliver Prior Society at Cambridge. The annual conferences are designed to provide an insight into the work of the Modern Languages Faculty, and provide an opportunity for school teachers and university colleagues to exchange ideas and discuss developments in the subject.

Teachers interested in applying for a bursary should contact one of the societies via their website.

19 January 2016: The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford invites proposals from anyone interested in applying for a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Up to two such Fellowships, of three years’ duration will be offered, funded jointly by The Leverhulme Trust and the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford.

Early Career Fellowships aim to provide career development opportunities for those who are at a relatively early stage of their academic careers, but who have a proven record of research. The expectation is that Fellows should undertake a significant piece of publishable work during their tenure, and that the Fellowships should lead to a more permanent academic position. Approximately 100 Fellowships will be available in 2016. Fellowships can be held at universities or at other institutions of higher education in the UK.

Applications are invited from those with a doctorate who had their doctoral viva not more than five years from the application closing date. Hence those who had their viva before 10 March 2011 are not eligible unless they have since had a career break.

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...

16 Oct 2015: Two Oxford translations have been shortlisted or commended in the prestigious Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015. David Constantine and Tom Kuhn have been shortlisted for their translation of Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht; Karen Leeder and David Constantine have been commended for Rubble Flora: Selected Poems by Volker Braun.

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.

Ancient Olympia Performance

17 Jun 2015: ‘Sparagmos’, ancient Greek for ‘dismemberment’, seems an unlikely title for a performance which took place in Exeter College Chapel. Nevertheless, as the theme of both Euripides’ ‘The Bacchae’ and Poliziano’s ‘Orpheus’, which I paired as a double-bill for the Turl Street Arts Festival in February 2015, the title could not have been more appropriate. Rendered into vibrant, modern English by Dr David Maskell, supported by a team of forty talented performers and with specially composed music by Ben van Leeuwen, Balliol’s Senior Organ Scholar, the plays met with resounding success.



Part of my aim in directing this production was to introduce classical theatre to young people. As well as implementing a special student rate of £1.50 per play, we took ‘The Bacchae’ to Oxford’s Cheney School, where we performed in front of around a hundred secondary school students. For feedback on this initiative and more information regarding my objectives, see the following links:

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 Martin Maiden, FBA, Professor of the Romance Languages and Fellow of Trinity, has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Bucharest on 26 September 2013, in recognition of his work in promoting Romanian Studies. Oxford has ever closer links with Romania, following the publication of the new Grammar of Romanian, OUP 2013, the arrival of Dr. Oana Uţă Bărbulescu, of the University of Bucharest, as Oxford's first ever lector in Romanian (thanks to the generosity of Institutul Limbii Române and the Romanian state). More information in Romanian is available here:

http://media.unibuc.ro/comunicate-presa/lingvistul-martin-maiden-doctor-honoris-causa-al-universitatii-din-bucuresti

The multi-media edition of Rameau's Nephew, (translated by Faculty members, Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman) has just won the 2015 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Digital Prize. With over a hundred illustrations and embedded musical clips, it can be read in paper or online versions, and also be downloaded. The online version can be read for free.

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."

Dr Claire Williams was interviewed in a BBC programme about Brazilian author Machado de Assis

Cycle Incident

Please take care when cycling around Oxford. A student found this knife embedded in the saddle in Mansfield Road public cycle racks. The incident has been reported to the Police.

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.

New Outreach Blog from the Sub-Faculty of French

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.