The Faculty regrets to announce the death of Paul Foote on 1 March 2011 in the John Radcliffe Hospital. Mr Foote was University Lecturer in Russian from 1954 until his retirement in 1993, and Fellow and Praelector in Russian at Queen's from 1964 until his retirement (and latterly an Emeritus Fellow).
More information regarding arrangements will follow. Our condolences go to his family, friends, and former colleagues.
Read all the latest news from the faculty, or visit our Events section to see what's on.
To receive our news as soon as it's published, subscribe to our RSS feed
A memorial service for Gudrun Loftus, Senior Language Instructor in German, will take place in St John's Chapel on Friday 6 May 2011, 11am, followed by a reception in the Garden Quad Reception Room, St John's College.
All friends, colleagues, and students past and present are welcome to attend (there is no need to RSVP).
A memorial service for Paul Foote will be held on Saturday, 11 June at 3 pm in The Queen's College Chapel.
The new version of Weblearn is now available to all Faculty staff and students. All the up-to-date course resources have been migrated from 'old' Weblearn to the new version which is available at:
https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/humdiv/modlang
The old site is now an archive and no new material will be added to it.
In addition, all the information relating to current students on the Faculty website has been moved to Weblearn. This includes handbooks, exam information and year abroad information.
Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford has been made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in recognition of his creative writing. The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, established in 1957, rewards “artists who have significantly contributed to the development of art and literature in France and in the rest of the world.”
Professor McGuinness has written two books of poems - The Canals of Mars (2004) and Jilted City (2010), both published by Carcanet – which have been translated into several languages and have appeared, translated by Gilles Ortlieb, in French poetry journals, notably Théodore Balmoral. His edition of Charles Dantzig's Collected Poems was published by Grasset last year.
His novel - The Last Hundred Days - about the downfall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania is due for publication later this month, and he is working on a book on Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France.
The first published novel by Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction for 2011. 'The Last Hundred Days' was inspired by his experience of the 1989 Romanian revolution.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-14307727
I am a journalist and former Oxford University student and I would like to forward you details about internship opportunities for MFL students at EU Radio Nantes. I think this could be a great opportunity for students on their year abroad. They can come to France for 4-6 months and work at a European radio station. They must be able to speak and write French well, though they do not necessarily need to be bilingual in the strict sense of the word. This is a rigorous and serious journalism opportunity for people who are interested in Europe. It's a great way for students to perfect their French and they will be trained to be a European radio journalist through hands on work.
Please find attached the details of the internship, as well as an application pack. Internships are available from March and from September 2010.
Please email year-abroad@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk to request further information.
Kind regards,
Victoria Sill
(Hertford College 2004)
The committee's citation for the honorable mention reads:
"Andrew Kahn has produced an extremely erudite study of Pushkin's lyrics, in which he explores and elucidates the intellectual context for these works. Very well read in the contemporary scholarship on English and continental Romanticism, he reveals the extent of Pushkin's profound engagement with the literary and cultural movements of his day. The volume is imaginatively organized around a set of themes that shed light on how Russia's greatest poet formed and developed his ideas about such matters as the role of inspiration in creativity, the classical and the Romantic, the question of commercial success for the artist, concepts of the hero, and the confrontation with mortality."
Andrew Kahn is university reader in Russian at the University of Oxford, fellow at Saint Edmund Hall, and lecturer at Queen's College. He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Pushkin and translator of Nicolai Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveler. His articles have appeared in journals such as Stanford Slavic Studies, Révue des Études Slaves, and EMF and books such as Remapping the Rise...
Colleagues and students will be saddened to learn of the death of Professor Elizabeth Fallaize on 6 December 2009. Please follow the links to see the obituaries that appeared in the national press.
The Times, 06/01/10, p54
Obituary: “Elizabeth Fallaize was an international authority on the work of Simone de Beauvoir as well as a leading figure in French studies, a much loved teacher and mentor, and from 2005 to 2008 a highly effective Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of Oxford.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6976887.ece
The Guardian, p.20, 04/01/2010, Judith Still
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jan/03/simonedebeauvoir-oxforduniversity
The University of Oxford is running a brand new summer school which is open to UK state school students currently in the lower sixth form. Successful applicants to the UNIQ summer school will enjoy a week in Oxford this July, living in one of the Oxford colleges and studying their chosen subject. 500 places are available to bright, motivated and enthusiastic students who would like the chance to see what studying and living in Oxford is really like. See http://www.ox.ac.uk/uniq for full details. There's an online brochure which tells you all about the summer school and the application process.
The Society for French Studies has announced the results of the 2009 Postgraduate Gapper Essay Prize. The winner is:
‘Skinner in Tandem: Against Methodological “Servitude Volontaire”’ by Tanya Raie Filer (University of Oxford)
The award includes a cash prize of £750 and expenses-paid travel to the next annual conference.
The Society for French Studies is delighted to announce the award of the tenth annual R. H. Gapper Book Prize to Alain Viala for La France galante (Presses Universitaires de France).
The Society also commends the three further works shortlisted for the prize:
Celia Britton: The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool University Press)
Margaret McGowan: Dance in the Renaissance. European Fashion – French Obsession (Yale University Press)
Gavin Parkinson: Surrealism, Art and Modern Science (Yale University Press)
The award, which is for the best book published in 2008 by a scholar working in Britain or Ireland in French studies, is made by the Society for French Studies together with Mr Richard Gapper, representing the R. H. Gapper Charitable Trust, on the recommendation of a Prize Jury appointed by the SFS. The Prize Jury for 2009 was composed as follows:
You can now follow the Taylor Institution Library on Facebook and Twitter and get instant information about opening times, events, library news and more. Search for Taylor Institution Library Oxford on Facebook or TAYOxford on Twitter, or follow these links:
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Oxford-United-Kingdom/Taylor-Institution-Library-Oxford/115880288429604
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TAYOxford
Alice Brooke, who is studying for a DPhil, funded by the AHRC, at Merton on the religious theatre of the seventeenth-century Mexican nun-poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, has been awarded a prestigious joint AHRC/ESRC Library of Congress scholarships.
The Library of Congress Scholarship is run jointly between the AHRC and the ESRC. The scheme offers the chance for AHRC/ESRC funded doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows and research assistants to access the internationally renowned research collection at the Library of Congress.
More information is available at:
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/LibraryofCongress.aspx
The prize, which has a value of €25,000, has been awarded in support of the Foundation's work on the complete works of Voltaire.
The annual prize was created in 2007 to reward individuals or institutions which promote French as an international language.
Links to:
The Voltaire Foundation
Académie Française
Ritchie Robertson, MA Edin, MA D.PHIL Oxf, Official Fellow in German, St John's College, and Professor of German, has been appointed to the Taylor Professorship of the German Language and Literature in the Sub-faculty of German, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, with effect from 1 October 2010. Professor Robertson will be a fellow of Queen's College.
Professor Robertson' staff page is:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/robertson
The Faculty is delighted to announce the election of Professor Michael Sheringham as a Fellow of the British Academy.
Each year, the British Academy elects to its Fellowship up to 38 outstanding UK-based scholars who have 'attained distinction in any of the branches of study which it is the object of the Academy to promote' – i.e. the humanities and the social sciences.
More information is available at:
http://www.britac.ac.uk/fellowship/elections/2010-Sheringham.cfm
The Chair of the Faculty Board is sad to announce that Mrs Gudrun Loftus, the Senior Language Instructor in German, died as the result of a tragic accident on Tuesday. Colleagues and students past and present will share our sense of loss, and our thoughts are with her family at this difficult time. Funeral arrangements will be circulated in due course and the Faculty hopes to arrange an occasion later in the academic year at which we can remember her.
Many of those who were shocked by the untimely death of Gudrun Loftus in a tragic accident have expressed the lasting importance which her teaching has had for them: for almost twenty years, she had been at the heart of German language teaching at the University of Oxford. When she took up her post in 1990, this marked a new departure for her as well as for the university, which created her post in response to the fact that the teaching of Modern Languages at schools had changed significantly. The shift in emphasis towards fluency in the spoken command of a foreign language had improved the ability of school-leavers to hold a conversation, but for many, writing in German and expressing themselves with accuracy was an increasingly unfamiliar and rather daunting task. Gudrun Loftus was a vigorous advocate of teaching grammar systematically in order to enable students to aspire towards speaking and writing like native speakers, and she was instrumental in putting together a course that helped students to achieve this. She was famously strict in her marks; students knew that the standards she expected were high, and that she had very clear views on what was and...
"Gerry, Oliver and family would like to sincerely thank Oxford University's German Faculty staff and students and St John's College for the many warm tributes to Gudrun as a much valued colleague and teacher, following her untimely death in Oxford recently.
Our sincere thanks also go to those who attended her requiem mass in St Bernardine's Church in Buckingham, and to those who sent cards, flowers and donations in Gudrun's name for World Villages for Children."