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
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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
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.
Twenty-five years since the fall of the Berlin Wall the poet Volker Braun will give a special reading of old and new work and answer questions with David Constantine and Karen Leeder on Tuesday 11 Nov. at 5pm, in the Seminar Room, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road.
This will be followed by a reception to mark the launch of Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (2014), to which everyone is welcome. This is the first collection of Braun’s poetry in English and spans 50 years of poems.
Spaces are limited and will be on a strictly first come first served basis. Please register with karen.leeder@new.ox.ac.uk if you wish to attend.
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.
Wolfson is a postgraduate college and proposes to make one election to a Stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship for three years starting in October 2013.
Wolfson College provides a lively interdisciplinary environment for the study of the Humanities. Alongside researchers in History, Classics, English and Oriental Studies, there is a thriving postgraduate and academic community of Modern Linguists. Wolfson now proposes to create a Stipendiary Research Fellowship in 'Literature in European Languages', broadly defined as research into the literary cultures created in the languages of Europe (excluding English), wherever those cultures might flourish geographically. Areas of study could include the texts (or
authors) of prose, poetry or drama, from the medieval period to the present day, from manuscripts to electronic media, and could extend to embrace a variety of approaches including, for example, thematic concerns, genre definition, life-writing or performance.
For more information and an application form, click here.
Belinda Jack has been elected as the next Gresham Professor of Rhetoric. She joins a distinguished roster — her predecessors in this position include Cecil Day-Lewis, William Empson, Jan Kott, and Stephen Spender.
Further details of Gresham College and the Professorship of Rhetoric can be found at:
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/gresham-professor-of-rhetoric
Oxford University has been ranked first for Modern Languages in the QS World Rankings for 2012-13, overtaking Harvard University who had the top spot last year. Professor Richard Cooper, Chair of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, said:
This is a powerful and gratifying endorsement of the breadth of our syllabus in Modern Languages, the quality of our students, both undergraduate and graduate, of our research libraries, and above all of the excellence and dedication in teaching and research of the members of our Faculty.
More information on the rankings can be found here:
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2013/modern-languages
Professor Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, FBA, learned on 3 May 2013 that her application for a collaborative research grant to HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) was one of 18 successful projects. The 3-year grant of almost 1 million Euros will enable her to work with colleagues in Germany, Poland and Sweden on ‘Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500-1800’. The focus of the project is the foreign consort as agent of cultural transfer. Among the case studies to be investigated are the Polish princess Katarzyna Jagiellonka, Duchess of Finland and Queen of Sweden (1526-83); Hedwig Eleonora, Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp and Queen of Sweden (1636-1715); the Portuguese princess Catarina of Braganza, Queen of Great Britain (1638-1705); and Maria Amalia, Princess of Saxony, Queen of the Two Sicilies and Queen of Spain (1724-1760).
A series of programmes on France Culture about the study of and research in philosophy at Oxford, featuring interviews with a selection of tutors on topics including John Locke, philosophy of language, analytic philosophy, and philosophy of mind. The programmes are broadcast 3-6 June, with podcasts downloadable from the France Culture website.
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.