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 this honour awarded to one of the Oxford’s major literary critics.

More information about The Balzan Project can be found here.