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.

Cristina Dondi, of the University of Oxford and the Secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), has been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for her project: "The 15th-century Book Trade: An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance".

Very little is known about the connections between fiction and eating disorders: there’s plenty of research on the (usually negative) effects of the mass media on body image, and there’s increasing interest among researchers and clinicians in ‘creative bibliotherapy’ — the use of creative writing including fiction for therapeutic purposes — in other mental health contexts. But so far research at the intersection of the study of eating disorders and fiction is very limited. A new collaboration between Emily Troscianko, Modern Languages Faculty member and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at TORCH, and the leading UK eating disorders charity Beat, aims to build on related research to find out more.

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 Leeder awarded Knowledge Exchange Fellowship

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...

By a decree dated 18 December 2013, gazetted on 23 December 2013, the President of Romania awarded Professor Martin Maiden, the Professor of the Romance Languages, the title of Commander in ‘Ordinul Național “Serviciu Credincios”’ (‘The National “Faithful Service” Order’), an honorific order whose origins can be traced back to 1878. The citation praises Professor Maiden for his work in promoting the Romanian language in the United Kingdom, and especially at the University of Oxford, where he has been instrumental in founding the Lectorate in Romanian, and for his role in fostering academic collaboration between Romania and the UK and in promoting Romania’s image abroad. The honour will be bestowed by the Romanian Ambassador at a ceremony on 21 March 2014.

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.

Death of Dr Jim Naughton

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

Oxford University top in the QS World University Rankings for 2013-4

The annual QS World University Rankings is a comprehensive guide to the world’s top universities in a range of popular subject areas. Using data on reputation and research citations, the rankings highlight the 200 top universities in the world for 30 individual subjects.

The top 9 universities in the UK with world rankings and overall score.

1 100.0 University of Oxford
2 98.7 University of Cambridge
8 84.7 UCL (University College London)
12 81.3 University of Edinburgh
24 77.4 The University of Warwick
32 75.1 SOAS - School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
33 75.0 The University of Manchester
48 70.7 University of York
49 70.4 King's College London (KCL)


More information can be found at

http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2014/modern-languages