A conference on Les Lumières au pluriel marks a stage of the ANR/DFG-funded EDULUM project. It is being held on 14-16 December at the Maison Française in Oxford and at All Souls College, with support from both organisations and from the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford.
Read all the latest news and upcoming events from the faculty on the main News page.
Congratulations to Dr Andrew Counter of the French Sub-Faculty on winning the very prestigious MLA Prize:
The Modern Language Association of America have awarded the twenty-fifth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies to Dr Counter for his book The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France, published by Oxford University Press.
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817), one of the greatest writers and the most famous woman of the early nineteenth century, is the subject of Radio 4’s In Our Time, hosted by Lord Bragg on November 16 2017. He is in conversation with Catriona Seth FBA, the Marshal Foch Professor of Literature and Fellow of All Souls, who recently edited Staël’s works for Gallimard’s prestigious “Pléiade” series, and with fellow academics Professor Alison Finch and Dr Katherine Astbury.
We are delighted to announce that one of our three entrants to the 2017 R.H. Gapper Undergraduate Essay Prize, Peter Tellouche, has been voted this year's winner.
If you, or any of your students, are interested in applying for 2018 entry, the Faculty is holding an information session on Modern Languages Masters courses.
International Colloquium Marking the 150th Anniversary of Baudelaire's Death and the 160th Anniversary of Les Fleurs du mal.
Organized by Ève Morisi (Oxford), André Guyaux (Paris-Sorbonne) and Bertrand Marchal (Paris-Sorbonne)
Catriona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and Fellow of All Souls, has been elected to the British Academy. Fellows of the British Academy represent the very best of humanities and social sciences research, in the UK and globally.
Chawton House in Hampshire played host to a conference on Germaine de Staël and Jane Austen jointly organised by Dr Gillian Dow of the University of Southampton, Dr Nicola Watson of the Open University and Oxford's Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, Catriona Seth.
In June 2017 a team of Oxford University undergraduate students, graduate students, and lecturers joined forces to perform Arseholes, an original new play about the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s two-year relationship.
In May Caroline Warman spoke to the teenage delegates of the International Philosophy Olympiad in Rotterdam about the Tolerance volume, which had been translated by 102 Oxford French students and tutors.
In June Prof. Jane Hiddleston and Dr Laura Lonsdale ran three workshops for Year 10 pupils from two East London schools, Haggerston School in Hackney and St Paul’s Way Trust School in Tower Hamlets, where a very high proportion of students speak more than one language.
From Michaelmas 2017 the Faculty will welcome the first Maison Française/St Catherine's College Visiting Fellows in Modern and Medieval Languages. They will lecture in the Faculty, be housed at the Maison Française Oxford (MFO) and be Research Associates at the College.
121 students from Oxford, along with their tutors, have translated extracts from 18th century thinkers from France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Italy for a new book which has just been published by Open Book.
Friday 5 May saw the culminating event of an exciting collaboration between the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the Faculty of Music in Oxford. The project, generously supported by the John Fell OUP Research Fund, has been investigating the descriptions of the imaginary sonata for piano and violin of the fictional composer Vinteuil from Marcel Proust's famous long novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
2017 sees the sixth year of Oxford University’s French film competition, in which school pupils are invited to watch (a) selected French film(s), and write an essay or script re-imagining the ending.
During the Enlightenment, many men and women of letters envisaged the continent’s future, in particular when stressing their hope that peace could be secured in Europe. Published in French, and edited by academics from the University of Oxford and the University of Augsburg, with colleagues from different European countries, this volume gathers such texts on Europe, its history, its diversity, but also on what its nations have in common.
Debra Walsh, teacher of French at Brynteg Comprehensive School in Bridgend, is one of ten state school teachers who have been recognised by the University of Oxford's annual Inspirational Teachers Awards. She was nominated by Elis Harrington, a first-year student at Jesus College studying French and German.
The University of Oxford has been ranked second in the Complete University Guide for 2018 entry, and very highly across the board for language subjects.
The Faculty is delighted to report that Neil Kenny and Patrick McGuinness have been announced as the joint winners of the prestigious R. Gapper Book Prize for their publications Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (Oxford: OUP, 2015) and Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France (Oxford: OUP, 2015) respectively.
The MFO is hosting a two day conference jointly organised by Sophie Lefay (Université d'Orléans), Laurent Turcot (Université du Québec à Trois Rivières) and Catriona Seth (University of Oxford) on walking and social rituals in the 18th century. It will include papers on national characteristics of walks, literary and educational walks, royal progresses and botanical collections, garden fashions and commercial activities for walkers. All welcome.