Introduction
Welcome to the fourth issue of The Oxford Polyglot
Oxford term is nearly at an end and soon (we trust) many of our current and former students will be heading off to foreign lands to use and brush up on their languages!
Where do languages go from here?
Neil Kenny, Professor of French and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls, is Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy.
Professor Neil Kenny
Inaugural Lecture by Catriona Seth FBA
The eighth Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, Catriona Seth FBA, gave her inaugural lecture 'Girls with Books. Reading, Contagion and Acquired Immunity in Eighteenth-Century Fiction'
Dr Gemma Tidman
“Half is true while the other make-believe”
Catherine Dove, an undergraduate at St Hilda’s spent her year abroad in Colombia and took the opportunity to interview Gabriel García Márquez’ sister Aida (the Spanish version of the text follows the English one)
Catherine Dove
A Year in Occitanie
Antoinette (Annie) Tuckwell, a final year undergraduate at Exeter College, recalls her year abroad as a librarian in Montpellier.
Antoinette Tuckwell
Welsh Connections
Gifted pupils from Wales came up to Oxford for a residential outreach programme.
Nicola Brown
Selling My Story – Returning to Oxford as a Mature Postgraduate
Jonathan Paine read Modern Languages in the 1970s. After a career as a banker for which his undergraduate degree gave him invaluable skills, he returned as a mature student.
Jonathan Paine
On Toby Garfitt and Creole poetry
On the occasion of Professor Toby Garfitt’s retirement, Peter Stevenson, who read French and Spanish in the 1980s, has written in with recollections of his undergraduate years and reflections on how they shaped his life.
Peter Stevenson
Working with languages after Oxford—the Night of Ideas
Zeena Valenti graduated from Magdalen College in 2017 with a joint honours degree in Philosophy and French. She was Assistant Coordinator of the Night of Ideas 2019 at the French Institute in London.
Zeena Valenti