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.

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...

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.

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 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."

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.

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.

Results of the French film essay competition 2015

Dr Christina Roaf, former University Lecturer in Italian, has died on 18th June at the age of 96.

Dr Roaf was born on 17 November 1917 and named after Christina Rossetti, who had once lived in the house. An account of her childhood appeared in the 2003 Somerville Magazine in the "Life before Somerville" section. Much of her childhood was spent travelling around Europe in the company of her mother, Vera Waddington, an exhibition of whose work she helped put on in 2007-08.

Taught by the legendary Enid Starkie, she gained a First in Modern Languages from Somerville, thanks in part to her proficiency in spoken French and Italian. During the War, she worked for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office research department, and was later posted to the British Consulate in Milan (1945) and the British Embassy in Rome (1946).

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.

Results of the French film essay competition 2015

Results from previous years

The French schools liaison blog, Adventures on the Bookshelf, is celebrating its first anniversary this week, and also its quarter-of-a-millionth page-view. Over the last twelve months it's grown from a trickle of interest at first, to now welcoming up to 6000 visitors a day, and having readers in over 100 countries (including Azerbaidjan, Brunei and Tokelau). A look back at some of its greatest hits.

An Oxford DPhil student (Sarah Hickmott, Merton) has won the 2014 R. H. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize, accorded by the Society for French Studies, for an essay titled ‘(En) Corps Sonore’, an interdisciplinary reflection on the question of listening in the work of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The prize includes an award of £750 and expenses-paid travel to the Annual Conference of the Society.

The joint runners-up for this year’s award included another Oxford postgraduate, Emma Claussen (St John's), along with Edmund Birch (Cambridge).

In 2013 an Oxford undergraduate Dulcie fforde (SEH) won another major prize accorded by the Society for French Studies, the R.H. Gapper Undergraduate Essay Competition. The 2014 prize is yet to be accorded.

A feast of narrative imagination and directorial invention!
With 179 entries from across 42 schools, the University of Oxford’s second French film essay competition received over three times more entries than in 2012, and from a greater number of schools and colleges. Equal to last year, though, was the very impressive range and richness of responses to the two set films: Comme une image (Years 10-11) and Un air de famille (Years 12-13). Entrants re-wrote the closing chapter, picking up narrative threads left hanging by each film’s ambiguous ending. So rich were the responses that, in addition to the winner and runner-up in each category, a selection of further entries were offered special commendation. To read more about the re-writings of each film, click here.

On Tuesday 18 June languages teachers from across Oxfordshire joined languages lecturers from Oxford University to share their expertise in Oxford’s first ever MFL teachmeet. A teachmeet is a bit like a conference but each presentation lasts for a short period of time – usually two or five minutes. Each presenter explains an activity or technique which has worked well for them. It’s about sharing best practice, inspiring others and making connections with other educators.

The event was organised by Helen Swift, University Lecturer in Medieval French and Schools Liaison Officer for the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, and the heads of languages in the OCL (Oxford City Learning) schools: Cheney, Wheatley Park, Matthew Arnold, St. Gregory The Great and Oxford Spires. These schools work together to share ideas, challenge and support each other. 35 teachers and lecturers attended the event. Most of the teachers were from OCL schools but there were also representatives from Henry Box, Bartholomew and Didcot Girls.

Professor Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French in the Faculty of Mediæval and Modern Languages at Oxford and Emeritus Research Fellow of St John’s, is to be congratulated on being appointed CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to Literary Scholarship. Author of major works of criticism, including The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (1979), Recognitions: a Study in Poetics (1988), Pré-Histoires (1999, 2001) and, most recently, Mignon’s Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century (2011), Professor Cave was recognised by the award of the International Balzan Prize (2009) “for his outstanding contributions to a new understanding of Renaissance literature and of the influence of Aristotelian poetics in modern European literature”. He used the prize to set up a research project, the Balzan Interdisciplinary Seminar, based at the St John’s College Research Centre, to address the question “What are the nature and value of literature as an object of knowledge in the interdisciplinary spectrum?” The Modern Languages Faculty is delighted at...

The impact of the introduction of the EBacc performance measure can be felt in this year's GCSE numbers, with modern foreign languages up by 15.8%.

French numbers are up from 153,436 to 177,288 (up 15.5%). German up from 57,547 to 62,932 (up 9.4%). Spanish up from 72,606 to 91,315 (up 25.8%). Other languages up from 29,843 to 31,368 (up 5.1%).

The figures show a change in market share: Spanish now represents over a quarter of GCSE entries (25.2%), taking one percentage point each from German (17.3%) and other languages (8.6%), while French retains just under half of total entries (48.9%).

Modern Languages at University
A letter to the TImes Higher Education by Jim Coleman, Chair of the University Council of Modern Languages, on degree-level language uptake.

The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities – Taylor Institution
November 1-2, 2013Conveners: Martin McLaughlin and Javier Muñoz-Basols
The first of three annual EHRC workshops on translation will be held on 1-2 November 2013 in TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities), Woodstock Rd, and in the Taylor Institution, St Giles.

Conveners: Martin McLaughlin and Javier Muñoz-Basols, with the assistance of Dr Elisabetta Tarantino

An Oxford undergraduate, Dulcie fforde (SEH), has won the prize in the 2013 R.H.Gapper Undergradute Essay Competition for the Society of French Studies. The subject of her essay was ‘“L’image n’a pas de sens propre” (Compagnon). Discuss the pertinence of this claim in relation to Renaissance poetic practice.’ This is the second year in a row that an Oxford undergraduate has won this prize, for which essays are judged anonymously.