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.

Cristina Dondi, of the University of Oxford and the Secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), has been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for her project: "The 15th-century Book Trade: An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance".

Very little is known about the connections between fiction and eating disorders: there’s plenty of research on the (usually negative) effects of the mass media on body image, and there’s increasing interest among researchers and clinicians in ‘creative bibliotherapy’ — the use of creative writing including fiction for therapeutic purposes — in other mental health contexts. But so far research at the intersection of the study of eating disorders and fiction is very limited. A new collaboration between Emily Troscianko, Modern Languages Faculty member and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at TORCH, and the leading UK eating disorders charity Beat, aims to build on related research to find out more.

The OUSU Teaching Awards Ceremony was held in the Weston Library on 28th May 2015. For the category of Outstanding Tutor there were 250 nominations, with a shortlist of four in the Humanities section, including two Modern Languages Tutors. The winner was Dr Vilma de Gasperin, Senior Instructor in Italian, to whom we offer warmest congratulations.

Professor Leeder awarded Knowledge Exchange Fellowship

Professor Karen Leeder has been awarded a year long Knowledge Exchange Fellowship for the Mediating Modern Poetry: Reception and Dialogue project. She will be working with the Southbank Centre, London to curate a series of events exploring aspects of modern European poetry and its transmission. A first focus is a specially curated evening exploring the reception of Rainer Maria Rilke for the biannual festival ‘Poetry International’ (July 2014). Rilke’s influence on modern culture is inescapable and has inspired poets from Auden to Zwetayava along with filmmakers, thinkers, composers and artists. An evening will be given over to events ‘After Rilke’ featuring major English-language and German poets and their wide-ranging responses to the poet and his life (translations, versions, new poems). This will feed into Leeder’s own project on ‘An English Rilke’, which teases out what makes an author travel like this and what happens to them en route (tackling a wide range of issues along the way). Thereafter a series of further events in Autumn 2014 will explore aspects of contemporary poetry in dialogue with major English and...

By a decree dated 18 December 2013, gazetted on 23 December 2013, the President of Romania awarded Professor Martin Maiden, the Professor of the Romance Languages, the title of Commander in ‘Ordinul Național “Serviciu Credincios”’ (‘The National “Faithful Service” Order’), an honorific order whose origins can be traced back to 1878. The citation praises Professor Maiden for his work in promoting the Romanian language in the United Kingdom, and especially at the University of Oxford, where he has been instrumental in founding the Lectorate in Romanian, and for his role in fostering academic collaboration between Romania and the UK and in promoting Romania’s image abroad. The honour will be bestowed by the Romanian Ambassador at a ceremony on 21 March 2014.

The Faculty's Portuguese Year Abroad students have been given a blog space by BBC Brasil, and the first post has been published, with a lively response from Brazilian readers.

Death of Dr Jim Naughton

We are sorry to announce the death of Dr Jim Naughton, who died on Sunday whilst an inpatient at the Churchill Hospital.

Jim was a much-valued member of the Modern Languages Faculty, whose warmth, intelligence and friendliness will be sadly missed. He came to Oxford from the University of Lancaster in the 1980s to take up a position as University Lecturer in Czech and Fellow of St Edmund Hall. During his 26 years in Oxford, he fulfilled a variety of roles within his College and served as Chair of the Faculty Board.

His tutorial teaching straddled College and University, as for most of his time in Oxford he was the only teacher of his subject. Both undergraduates and postgraduates greatly valued their contact with him and some have remained in touch for many years. He is well-known in the world of Czech studies for his grammars of the Czech and Slovak languages, as well as for his translations, for example of the short stories of Bohumil Hrabal.

A funeral service will take place in the St Edmund Hall Chapel on Wednesday 26 February at 12.30pm, followed by a burial at Wolvercote Cemetery at 2.00pm. Please contact the Revd Will Donaldson...

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.

Annette Volfing has been elected to the 'Kommision für Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters' (Committee for German literature of the Middle Ages) of the Bavarian Academy of Science and Humanities. This body has oversight of a number of prestigious research projects, notably the monograph series MTU (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen) and a project devoted to the cataloguing of German-language illustrated medieval manuscripts. The committee, chaired by Professor Jan-Dirk Müller, has a small and very distinguished membership. In recent years, Nigel Palmer has been the only non-German member. For further details, see http://www.badw.de/orga/klassen/kl_phil/k_23_dlma/index.html

Oxford University top in the QS World University Rankings for 2013-4

The annual QS World University Rankings is a comprehensive guide to the world’s top universities in a range of popular subject areas. Using data on reputation and research citations, the rankings highlight the 200 top universities in the world for 30 individual subjects.

The top 9 universities in the UK with world rankings and overall score.

1 100.0 University of Oxford
2 98.7 University of Cambridge
8 84.7 UCL (University College London)
12 81.3 University of Edinburgh
24 77.4 The University of Warwick
32 75.1 SOAS - School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
33 75.0 The University of Manchester
48 70.7 University of York
49 70.4 King's College London (KCL)


More information can be found at

http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2014/modern-languages

One of the Faculty’s graduate students, Amaranta Saguar García, supervised by Dr Juan-Carlos Conde of the Sub-Faculty of Spanish, has been announced as one of the winners of the prestigious Fifth International ‘Academia del Hispanismo’ prize. The prize is awarded to the best doctoral theses completed during the year in the field of Hispanic Literature. Amaranta will have her work published by Editorial Academia del Hispanismo as a result of this success. Her thesis dealt with Fernando de Rojas’s medieval masterpiece, Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (better known simply as the Celestina).

Results of the French film essay competition 2015

Dr Helen Swift wins Outstanding Tutor Award

Congratulations to Dr Helen Swift for winning the Outstanding Tutor Award in the Humanities category of the 2014 OUSU Student Led Teaching Awards. More information can be found at: http://teachingawards.ousu.org/2014-winners/



Humanities: Dr Helen Swift







Nominations for Most Acclaimed Lecturer included Professor Ritchie Robertson and Dr Maria Del Pilar Blanco.



Humanities: Professor Ritchie Robertson, Dr Maria Del Pilar Blanco

Tutors: Dr María del Pilar Blanco, Dr Ben Bollig, Dr María Donapetry, and Dr Claire Williams

Our nomination for a Teaching Excellence Award has been approved by the Humanities Division. This award is made in recognition of the high quality of our teaching and the important contribution which we make to the teaching of Latin American Studies in general and Latin American Film Studies in particular.

Film is an integral part of a number of undergraduate modern languages courses at Oxford and has also been one of the most important emerging areas in Latin American studies in recent years. We have worked together to develop a shared paper on Latin American cinema. The option proposed an innovative format that took into account the mixed level of expertise in film amongst potential students and the different areas of expertise of the teaching team.

The course thus gives students the opportunity to discover and explore major movements in the history of cinema in Latin America, from the radical experiments and manifestos of the 1950s and 60s to the slick blockbusters and internationally successful co-productions of the twenty-first century, including...

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.

Professor Valerie Worth-Stylianou's recent book, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern France: Treatises by Caring Physicians and Surgeons (1581-1625), has been awarded the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW)'s 2013 prize for the Best Teaching Edition in the field of gender and women’s studies. Details.

Results of the French film essay competition 2015

Results from previous years

We are delighted to announce that Henrike Lähnemann, currently Chair in German Studies at the University of Newcastle, will be joining us as the Chair of Medieval German. This is one of the eight statutory chairs of the Faculty for Medieval and Modern Languages - and the first to be taken up in German by a woman in the 150 years of history of Modern Languages at Oxford. Her predecessors are Peter Ganz, the famous medievalist and editor, among other texts, of the Tristan by Gottfried of Straßburg, and Nigel F. Palmer, one of the best known academic British figures in German medieval Studies. She will start her new job on 1 January 2015.

To find out more about Henrike Lähnemann's research profile and her ambitions for German Studies in the UK, read an interview with her on Academia.net and a report on NU Connection.