The 2011 Sylvia Naish Lecture will be held on Thursday, 24 March 2011 and will be given by Alexandra Lloyd (Wadham College, Oxford) on 'Zeitzeugen' and 'Sachzeugen': the Physical Legacy of Third Reich Childhood.

The Sylvia Naish Lectures were launched in memory of Sylvia Naish, an accomplished linguist, translator, Friend of Germanic Studies and benefactor of the former Institute of Germanic Studies.

Each year, research students registered for higher degrees in the field of Germanic studies at Universities in the United Kingdom are invited to submit proposals for the next lecture. The event forms part of the Institute’s programme of activities, open to the public. The theme of the lecture should be related to the student’s topic of research. Modest travel and/or accommodation expenses as appropriate will be covered by the Sylvia Naish Bequest. The lecture is published in abridged form in the next issue of the Newsletter, annual magazine of the Friends of Germanic Studies.

More information can be found at:

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).

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 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."